Inchbald

Inchbald, ELIZABETH, actress, dramatist, and novelist, was the daughter of John Simpson, farmer at Standingfield, Bury St Edmunds, where she was born on 15th October 1753. While quite a girl she determined to become an actress, and when only eighteen left her home to seek a theatrical engagement in London. After a series of strange adventures she betook herself to her relations in London, and with them she met Joseph Inchbald, an obscure actor, whom she married on 9th June 1772. She then went to Bristol, where she made her début as Cordelia on 4th September 1772; and for some years she played in provincial theatres. Her husband died suddenly in 1779, and in 1780 (3d October) she appeared in London, playing Bellario in Philaster, at Covent Garden. Here she remained for nine years, but never rose beyond mediocrity, an impediment in her speech, which was, however, supposed to be cured, being certainly a bar to her progress. But before she left Covent Garden, in 1789, she had found her true vocation—literature, and to it she devoted herself till her powers began to fail. Her earliest efforts were plays, her first being The Mogul Tale, a farce produced in July 1784. She wrote or adapted nineteen plays, her best being the comedies of Such Things are (1787), The Midnight Hour (1787), and The Wedding Day (1794); the farces of Appearance is Against Them (1785) and The Widow's Vow (1786); and her adaptation from Kotzebue, Lovers' Vows (1798). She edited the well-known Inchbald's British Theatre (25 vols.), a Modern Theatre (10 vols.), and a Collection of Farces (7 vols.). But her fame rests not upon her dramatic work so much as upon her novels, A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796), which rank among English standard novels. Mrs Inchbald, who was a Catholic, became very devout in her later years, and died at Kensington House (then a Catholic establishment), 1st August 1821. Her biography by Boaden (2 vols. 1833) is one of the most cumbrous and ill-digested even of that writer's productions. She wrote an autobiography, but destroyed the MS. by the advice of her spiritual director. See the Memoir by William Bell Scott prefixed to a new edition of A Simple Story and Nature and Art (1880).