A Simple Story (novel)
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''A Simple Story'' is a
novel A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ...
by English
author In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...
and
actress An actor (masculine/gender-neutral), or actress (feminine), is a person who portrays a character in a production. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. ...
Elizabeth Inchbald Elizabeth Inchbald (née Simpson, 15 October 1753 – 1 August 1821) was an English novelist, actress, dramatist, and translator. Her two novels, '' A Simple Story'' and '' Nature and Art'', have received particular critical attention. Life B ...
. Published in February 1791 as an early example of a "novel of passion", it was very successful and became widely read in England and abroad. It went into a second edition in March 1791. It is still in print today.E.g
this edition
published by
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...
.


Plot

The novel is divided into four volumes, two each devoted to its two storylines. The first volumes books follow the love story of young Miss Milner (we are never told her first name) and her
guardian Guardian usually refers to: * Legal guardian, a person with the authority and duty to care for the interests of another * ''The Guardian'', a British daily newspaper (The) Guardian(s) may also refer to: Places * Guardian, West Virginia, Unit ...
Dorriforth, who begins the novel as a
Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...
priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deity, deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in parti ...
. Miss Milner is a seventeen-year-old orphan, whose father's deathbed wish entrusted her to Dorriforth's guardianship despite disapproving of Catholicism. Miss Milner admires Dorriforth but struggles to obey his strict rules. She flirts with Lord Lawnly, forcing Dorriforth to fight a duel to protect her honor. Several deaths in Dorriforth's family cause him to inherit the title of Lord Elmwood, bringing with it a social obligation to marry and have children to carry on the Elmwood family name. Miss Milner falls in love with Dorriforth. The Pope releases Dorriforth from his vow of chastity, and he becomes engaged to the former heir's fiancée, Miss Fenton; their relationship is tepid but prudent on both sides. Dorriforth then realises that he has passionate feelings for Miss Milner, which he resists both due to his engagement and due to his doubts about Miss Milner's suitability as a wife. Through a series of machinations, however, assisted by Miss Woodley (a kindhearted spinster) and Sanford (a Jesuit mentor of Dorriforth's), Dorriforth's engagement to Miss Fenton is broken and he and Miss Milner are engaged. The third volume then abruptly transitions to the deathbed of Lady Elmwood (the former Miss Milner), some seventeen or eighteen years later. We learn that Lord Elmwood had been at his estate in the
West Indies The West Indies is an island subregion of the Americas, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island country, island countries and 19 dependent territory, dependencies in thr ...
for so long that Lady Elmwood assumed he was unfaithful, and had an affair of her own with Lord Lawnly. When Lord Elmwood returns, he banishes Lady Elmwood and refuses to acknowledge their only child, Matilda. A desperate letter that Lady Elmwood writes before dying convinces him to permit Matilda to live on one of his estates, on the condition that he never sees her. Volumes three and four then narrate Matilda's young adulthood, as she "haunts" Lord Elmwood's house. She is tutored by Miss Woodley and Sanford, and is raised to idolize the father whom she never sees. She meets her cousin, Rushbrook, her father's nephew and heir, and they begin a secret friendship, based largely around reading. One day, Matilda accidentally meets her father on a staircase, and he banishes her. She languishes and falls ill. When a Lord Margrave learns she is no longer under her father's protection, he abducts her. He is about to rape her when Lord Elmwood (who has had a change of heart) rescues her. Rushbrook, who has fallen in love with her, is now able to secure Lord Elmwood's approval for their marriage. Lord Elmwood tells him that Matilda herself must decide. Rushbrook begs her for her hand, and the narrator says: "Whether the heart of Matilda, such as it has been described, could sentence him to misery, the reader is left to surmise—and if he supposes that it did not, he has every reason to suppose their wedded life was a life of happiness." This is the end of the narrative, and the narrator then provides a moral lesson for the novel.


Major themes

The book touches on issues including the
education of women Female education is a catch-all term for a complex set of issues and debates surrounding education (primary education, secondary education, tertiary education, and health education in particular) for girls and women. It is frequently called girl ...
, Catholicism,
sensibility Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means thro ...
, and
gender roles A gender role, or sex role, is a social norm deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their gender or sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The specifics regarding these gende ...
. The book thematizes a problem of women's education, highlighting the differences between the academic educations that men receive and the emphasis on personal appearance and
sensibility Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means thro ...
in women's education. The character of Miss Milner represents what Inchbald saw as the current social norm for women's "fashionable" education, in which women were taught to use their bodies instead of their minds. The ending of the novel declares a moral lesson about women's education that links Miss Milner's unhappy ending and Matilda's happy one to the difference in their educations:
he readerhas beheld the pernicious effects of an ''improper education'' in the destiny which attended the unthinking Miss Milner.—On the opposite side, what may not be hoped from that school of prudence—though of adversity—in which Matilda was bred? And Mr. Milner, Matilda's grandfather, had better have given his ''fortune'' to a distant branch of his family—as Matilda's father once meant to do—so that he had given to his daughter
However, the "proper" education that Matilda has received is not the purely-intellectual education that men receive, as
Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft ( , ; 27 April 175910 September 1797) was an English writer and philosopher best known for her advocacy of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional ...
advocated the year after the novel's publication in her ''
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ''A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects'' , is a 1792 feminist essay written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and is one of the earliest work ...
''. Instead, Matilda's education balances both emotional sensibility and intellectual rationality. Another important aspect of Matilda's education is that, unlike Miss Milner, who participated widely in fashionable society as an heiress, Matilda is imprisoned in her father's house, and her daily experience is characterized by
abjection In critical theory, abjection is the state of being cast off and separated from norms and rules, especially on the scale of society and morality. The term has been explored in post-structuralism as that which inherently disturbs conventional ident ...
.


Style

Many scholars have observed theatrical aspects to the novel and attributed these to Inchbald's career as an actress and playwright. These scholars note that many scenes describe characters in terms of dramatic tableaus and theatrical gestures to evoke emotion. Nora Nachumi identifies these gestures as filling in to convey emotions that the characters are unable to express in other ways, such as when Dorriforth embraces the unconscious Matilda to communicate "a love he refuses to utter." She argues that the emotional language of gestures allows women to resit the logocentric discourse of patriarchy and achieve a limited degree of agency.


Composition

The first half of the novel was written between 1776 and 1779, and the second half between 1780 and 1791. Many believe that the novel was written with the famous actor
John Philip Kemble John Philip Kemble (1 February 1757 – 26 February 1823) was a British actor. He was born into a theatrical family as the eldest son of Roger Kemble, actor-manager of a touring troupe. His elder sister Sarah Siddons achieved fame with him o ...
, for whom Inchbald had also written plays, imagined as the character Dorriforth.


Reception

The general reception of ''A Simple Story'' was favourable.
Maria Edgeworth Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel i ...
, a novelist and educational
philosopher Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
, wrote a
letter Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech or none in the case of a silent letter; any of the symbols of an alphabet * Letterform, the g ...
to Elizabeth Inchbald, in which she warmly praised the story, saying that she had "never read any novel—I except ''none''—I never read any novel that affected me so strongly, or that so completely possessed me with the belief in the real existence of all the people it represents". After Inchbald's death ''A Simple Story'' passed out of notice for a time, until a 1908 reprint by G. L. Strachey "rescuing the novel from oblivion" brought it back into circulation.
Terry Castle Terry Castle (born October 18, 1953) is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," she has published eight books, including the anthology ''The Literat ...
further revived scholarly interest in the novel in 1986, with her book ''Masquerade and Civilization'', which calls it "the most elegant English fiction of the century (not excluding Sterne)" and "a small neglected masterpiece".


External links

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Simple Story British romance novels 1791 novels Catholic novels English novels Novels set in England Novels about nobility