On the Art of Dramatic Probability: Elizabeth Inchbald's Remarks for The British Theatre

In 1806, Longman & Co. publishers commissioned the accomplished actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald to compose a series of prefatory remarks for the plays to be included in their British Theatre series. One hundred and twenty-five in all, each of the plays for Longman's British Theatre was originally published and sold separately at a rate of about one per week. Once the series was complete, the plays were bound together and sold as a twenty-five-volume set. As the surviving diary entries from the two-year period during which she wrote her Remarks testify, the task proved both arduous and unrelenting for Inchbald, especially as she had no hand in selecting the plays to be included and no control over the order in which she was asked to compose her critical commentaries. Working almost constantly, no sooner had she read one play, drafted her remarks, and copyedited the proof, than she had to turn to the next play sent by Longman, collect her thoughts, and start the process all over again. For the most part, as Annibel Jenkins has noted, “[T]here seems to be no pattern of publishing by date or genre; a tragedy by Shakespeare came out one week and a contemporary comedy the next.” At one point, the strain of this process was so unbearable that Inchbald even tried to renege on her contractual obligations, writing to Longman, “begging to decline any further progress.” This request, as her first biographer, James Boaden, records, Longman “could not be expected to permit; and she was therefore compelled to remark through the whole year.” In the event, and however “dreadful” the task may have been for Inchbald, the widely advertised series proved a “great commercial success,” and Inchbald's Remarks have come down to us as one of the first great achievements in English dramatic criticism of the early nineteenth century.

Selling a life

This section begins with Harris’s auctioning of his Bellemonte estate as debts threatened to collapse the theatre and the debtor’s prison beckoned. The 1819 fire-sale of Bellemonte, and everything within it, provides one record of his life. One article auctioned was his portrait of the leading playwright, Elizabeth Inchbald. Using it as a starting point, this section illuminates the dark recesses of their complex relationship which was conducted as business between playwright and manager but often reached towards something more. By reclaiming Inchbald’s life and her relationship with Harris from the imaginations of Georgian hacks, this section challenges Harris’s sexual reputation as a disturbing predator who exploited his position of authority over a community of vulnerable actresses. In the process, it confronts the biographical difficulty of piecing together the lives of people who did not want to be publicly known.

Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals

This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, Laura Engel argues that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality), thus participating in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and could also feel connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses. Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, suggests ways of seeing that, Engel contends, connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated women.

‘This Lady is Descended from a Good Family’: Women and Biography in British Magazines, 1770–1798

Hannah Doherty Hudson asserts that biography is an important, even ubiquitous element of eighteenth-century periodicals, and that it was largely a genre that excluded women because it tended to demand genius, curiosity, and public approbation—qualities difficult for a woman of any reputation to come by. And yet, there were important exceptions, often writers and actresses, which she explores in detail; periodical readers of both sexes were clearly interested in women’s biographies. Key to this argument are two case studies: of the women’s biographies featured by the European Magazine (1782–1826) in the post-Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828) era, and of the magazine biographies of Elizabeth Inchbald. Ultimately, contends Hudson, magazine interludes with women’s biography helped re-shape the reception of the biographical genre writ large.

Struggling, Stupendous Female Artistic Aspirations

Women’s struggles to express themselves artistically, whether in the visual arts or in literature, has never been easy. This writing evaluates women’s creative efforts, from Virginia Woolf’s fictional Judith Shakespeare, to the playwrights Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Inchbald, whose plays scarcely outlived their own era. In the twentieth century, Woolf shows Lily Briscoe painting despite discouragement, and Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt’s female characters describe similar artistic struggles to achieve success. The real-life efforts of Sylvia Plath show her creating through the traumas of her life, while Frida Kahlo undertakes a parallel struggle to create her amazing paintings through dreadful pain. These two consummate artists, Plath and Kahlo, immortalize woman’s agonizing self-expression in their verbal and visual portraits, overcoming considerable obstacles. This work presents the historical toils and fictional accounts of women artists in their attempts at artistic self-expression, proving that such efforts come at a high cost to the artist even to this day.

Struggling, Stupendous Female Artistic Aspirations

Women’s struggles to express themselves artistically, whether in the visual arts or in literature, has never been easy. This writing evaluates women’s creative efforts, from Virginia Woolf’s fictional Judith Shakespeare, to the playwrights Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Inchbald, whose plays scarcely outlived their own era. In the twentieth century, Woolf shows Lily Briscoe painting despite discouragement, and Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt’s female characters describe similar artistic struggles to achieve success. The real-life efforts of Sylvia Plath show her creating through the traumas of her life, while Frida Kahlo undertakes a parallel struggle to create her amazing paintings through dreadful pain. These two consummate artists, Plath and Kahlo, immortalize woman’s agonizing self-expression in their verbal and visual portraits, overcoming considerable obstacles. This work presents the historical toils and fictional accounts of women artists in their attempts at artistic self-expression, proving that such efforts come at a high cost to the artist even to this day.