According to writer Mary Shelley, when Elizabeth Inchbald would enter a room, every man present turned his attention to her, ignoring all other women in the room. This beautiful actress and author was born Elizabeth Simpson at Standingfield, Suffolk, on October 15, 1753, the eighth child and sixth daughter of the Catholic farmer John Simpson and his wife, the former Mary Rushbrook.

At an early age she fell in love with the stage. When she was seventeen, she tried to join the theater in Norwich, where her brother George was acting. She received encouragement but no engagement. On April 11, 1772, she boarded the Norwich Fly, bound for London’s playhouses forty miles away. Here, too, she could not gain a foothold. On June 9, 1772, she married the actor Joseph Inchbald, whom she had met the previous year when she visited her married sisters in the English capital. Joseph Inchbald was twice Elizabeth’s age, but he had theatrical experience and connections. Their seven-year marriage would be tempestuous, in large part because Elizabeth’s beauty gained her many admirers and her independent spirit caused her to reject subservience to her husband. The rebellious Miss Milner of A Simple Story is largely a self-portrait.

Through her husband’s connections and her own good looks, Inchbald secured positions in various provincial theaters, where she performed such leading roles as Cordelia to her husband’s Lear, Desdemona to her husband’s Othello, Cleopatra in John Dryden’s All for Love: Or, The World Well Lost (pr. 1677), and Lady Snearwell in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (pr. 1777). Such parts may have satisfied her ego, but acting in Hull, Edinburgh, or Dublin paid poorly. After Joseph’s sudden death on June 6, 1779, the widowed Inchbald returned to London to try her luck, which now proved better: Thomas Harris of Covent Garden hired her. However, in the metropolis, she received only minor parts, and in 1782, she returned to the provincial theaters of Shrewsbury and Dublin. Her roles were bigger, but her income remained about one hundred pounds a year. In 1783, she went back to Harris.

Her experience had taught her what pleased audiences, and the early 1780’s, she began writing plays. Her earliest efforts never saw daylight, but on July 6, 1784, the summer Haymarket Theatre produced her farce The Mogul Tale, with Inchbald as Selima. The piece earned her a hundred guineas, as much as a year’s salary. The success of her next comedies allowed her to abandon acting in 1789 to concentrate on her writing, and by 1805, she was able to retire. Thereafter, in addition to working on The British Theatre and two other anthologies, Inchbald contributed the occasional periodical article. She also devoted much time to writing her memoirs, though on her deathbed she ordered that these be burnt, and they were. Inchbald died on August 1, 1821, and was buried in Kensington churchyard.