Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History by Ben P. Robertson (review)

Ben P. Robertson is an established authority on the actress, playwright, editor, and novelist, Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821). This latest study joins his edition of The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald (2007) and his monograph Inchbald, Hawthorne and the Romantic Moral Romance (2009). Robertson’s energetically researched Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History covers, one presumes exhaustively, the numerous editions and reviews of Inchbald’s work from her own time to the present day and adds much to what we know about her life.

What emerges is a rural-to-riches narrative about the beautiful, middle-ranking actress, daughter of a Catholic farmer, who overcame a stutter and early widowhood, using her theatrical experience to accrue a fortune and to earn lasting acclaim. Some will regret that Robertson passes swiftly over the accusations of sedition arising from Inchbald’s Covent Garden play Every One Has His Fault (1793). And not everyone will agree that “the success of male novelists likely encouraged women to begin writing novels … an easy form to master” (p. 5). Nevertheless, Robertson’s direct writing style and his wide-ranging, meticulous detective work, from manuscript to gravestone, consolidates the view that Inchbald built and preserved her reputation in the way that she constructed her writing—by responding to critique and reception.

The first chapter covers Inchbald’s acting career and the publicity that followed her retirement, including international exaggerations of her illness and fallacious rumors of marriage to William Godwin. Then it moves to the end of her life and Robertson’s intriguing search for her grave. Robertson also draws attention to her diaries’ codes—dots, crosses and abbreviations—usefully illustrated by a full-scale reproduction from the 1820 diary. The chapter ends with a brief but pertinent assessment of the influence of Inchbald’s acting on her authorship.

The second chapter gives a chronological overview of Inchbald’s plays and their performances in Britain and North America. Much is managed through lists, which impart a good rhythm to the text, punctuating each play’s history and reception and offering convenient points of reference. These lists declare the long popularity of her plays, particularly in the United States, while a useful table shows at a glance the popularity of her plays in Romantic-era London, despite the improbability of their plots, about which several contemporary reviewers complained. Robertson’s acronyms of the plays’ titles may demand patience and some of the prose retains an awkward, list-like quality. This is an awkward effect, arising from the essential data of place, performance, and publication. When Robertson is more discursive, he offers important new information about French and German sources for Inchbald’s adaptations as well as about her attitudes toward adapting drama for the British taste.

The third chapter, about Inchbald’s novels, briefly considers two epistolary novels, Emily Herbert or Perfidy Punished (1787), and Appearance is Against Them (1786), published anonymously, but later attributed to Inchbald. This attribution is compromised because, as Robertson points out, the British Library catalogue lists Emily Herbert as the primary author of the first novel and places Inchbald’s main-author heading in the “contributor” category. However, the authorship and popularity of A Simple Story (1791) is clear. Robertson follows its many continuing editions around the world, a circuitousness delightfully illustrated by the reproduction of the frontispiece of a French translation into Russian (1794). He also describes nineteenth-century reprints in North America, beyond British copyright laws. Amazingly, Robertson also traces the Inchbald holdings of contemporary circulating libraries as well as modern archives. Clearly revealed is other novelists’ continuing admiration for A Simple Story, including that of her friend Maria Edgeworth, as well as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Lytton Strachey.

The final chapter is based on Inchbald’s “Remarks” or Prefaces to plays for Longman’s British Theatre series, which she began in 1806. Robertson quotes from correspondence between Inchbald and George Colman the...