I'll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (review)

Elizabeth Inchbald was not only "one of the first professional writers to succeed in writing both plays and novels" (512), she was also a writer of one hundred twenty-five play prefaces that were considered the most professional of her time (453). She produced twenty-one plays on the London stage; her novel A Simple Story was one of the most important pieces of fiction in the 1790s; and her theatrical criticism established a precedent for the first half of the nineteenth century.

Born in 1753 to farm life in Suffolk, she joined the provincial theatre at an early age, marrying actor Joseph Inchbald when she was eighteen and he was thirty-seven. Annibel Jenkins interestingly details the variety of theatres the Inchbalds encountered—some well-appointed, some dirty and uncomfortable—as well as the perils of traveling in hazardous weather. In 1777 the Inchbalds were hired on the York circuit along with the Siddons/Kemble family, with whom they established a life-long friendship.

Joseph Inchbald's sudden death in 1779 was a turning point for Elizabeth. Mr. Inchbald had been content to play in provincial companies; now Elizabeth had no one to hold back her ambition to play in London. Although her husband had coached her, and she was tall, slender, and "strikingly beautiful" (13), Elizabeth had a major handicap—she stuttered. After three years in London and one in Dublin, she realized that she would never rise above supporting roles and that acting forced her "to live on the edge of real poverty" (137). Critics of her acting described it as "more artificial than natural" (68). However, Inchbald had also enjoyed writing since her youth, and after repeated rejections, her first play, A Mogul Tale, was accepted in 1784. From the time of its immediate success "she was never again without a play on the stage until her last one in 1805" (107-08). By 1789 she could support herself totally by her writings, and she ceased acting. Astute financially, she became comfortably well-off and "virtually supported her family" (514).

Jenkins quotes extensively from Inchbald's "pocket-books" (daily memorandums) to illustrate the details of her living and theatrical arrangements. We hear about rent, housing problems, hair dressing, laundry, mending, shoes, cooking, weather, her health, fashion, dressmaking, reading, obtaining coal, with whom she had tea, with whom she went on excursions, to whom she loaned money, what she spent her money on, what she said to tradesmen, and so on. This material is revelatory, but the reader may become bogged down in what went on day by day in Inchbald's household. The material could be summarized to give it more clarity and swiftness.

Allardyce Nicoll considered Inchbald's plays as good as any others of the period, and I'll Tell You What comparable with the work of Sheridan and Goldsmith (497). Inchbald was not a neophyte who refused to revise her works, but a professional who cooperated with the theatre managers, rewriting her plays to suit their suggestions and what would appeal most to audiences. Her plays frequently reflected political events and current crazes, such as the mania for ballooning, Persian shawls, gaming, English colonials, the trial of Warren Hastings, mesmerism, the child of nature, and divorce. One theme which Inchbald repeatedly explored was the realistic depiction of family relationships. Inchbald's characters believably have both favorable and flawed traits, with couples confronting and solving their problems. Inchbald was a particularly stong and independent-minded woman herself, and so most of her works feature the "Inchbald woman." Independent but loving, with more common sense than their guardians or husbands, these women often direct the action of the play or novel. In contrast, Inchbald almost always includes a man who is an empty-headed fop. Although half of her plays were adapted from foreign dramas, she reworked the originals until they "became virtually her own works," making the characters more complex and appealing...