Melodrama and the Politics of Literary Form in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Works

The aesthetics of melodrama were central to the work of Elizabeth Inchbald. In this article, I build on critical accounts of her wellknown novel A Simple Story that recognize its theatricality by adding analyses of the theatricality of her less familiar novel Nature and Art and the novelistic aspects of her last original play, Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are. I use Inchbald’s hybrid practice to argue that melodrama evolved out of the two-way traffic between the novel and the stage, thus proposing an alternative to standard accounts that position it as originating on the French stage. Exploring the contrast that Inchbald drew between the novelist’s liberty and the dramatist’s enslavement in her essay “To the Artist” in light of her own hybrid practice, this article, moreover, describes her contributions to a new organization of literature, and the place she would give to politics in its emergence.