THE DIARIES OF ELIZABETH . INCHBALD. By Ben P. Robertson, editor. Three volumes, 1,200pp. Pickering and Chatto. Pounds 275. 978 1 851 96868 8.
In 1772, Elizabeth Simpson left a note for her mother and took the stagecoach from Suffolk to London. She was nineteen, tall, blonde, pretty, and she had a stammer, but she was resolved on a career as an actress. There is a famous story that she threw a basin of hot water over a manager who made a pass at her. Not for her the fate of Dorothy Jordan, who bore a manager's child and then became the mistress of the Duke of Clarence (and gave birth to ten more children); Elizabeth quickly married Joseph Inchbald, an actor twice her age.
Marriage offered protection and, in her case, freedom. It meant she could concentrate on her work. She was to become "the celebrated Mrs Inchbald"; and though a grinding apprenticeship as a strolling player laid the groundwork, it was not through acting that she achieved her fame, but as a playwright, novelist and theatre critic. One of the fascinations of reading her early diaries is to see how hard she worked at every aspect of her craft: whenever she was not on stage she was behind it or in front, watching. During the day she read, learned her parts, "spouted" her lines (sometimes while taking her regular walks) "sorted" her stage clothes, listened and observed, wrote.
She was disappointed not to be given leading parts, but recognized her own limitations. As Juliet she "rehearsed very ill and was quite unhappy"; in Mourning Bride she was "dissatisfied with my self"; and a few days later her husband "found some fault with my acting". The "high words" or "very high words" regularly exchanged with Mr Inchbald (he was always designated thus in the diaries) seem mostly to have been about work. Elizabeth was short-tempered and fiercely independent. Although married, she made a point of controlling her finances, meticulously recording certain kinds of expenditure: gloves, shoes, fabric, ribbons, pins, hair dressing, fruit in the evening, nuts, wine. She paid for her own washing to be done each week and Mr Inchbald paid for his. She conducted her own negotiations with managers about her salary, generally ending up feeling "unhappy" or "melancholy".
Joseph Inchbald died suddenly in 1779. They had no children. Mrs Inchbald, still young and beautiful, in the public eye and settled in London, was circled by many eligible men. She refused them all, and not only because, like her old friend Mr Wilson, they were drunk: "Saturday Evening Mr Wilson rather in Liquor said much to me of Marriage". She was by no means the reclusive figure then that she later became: the diaries reveal her constant sociability in a smallish circle of fellow thespians and writers. She knew everybody: from the Kemble clan to radical thinkers like William Godwin. Every day had its tea-drinking or supper-time conviviality, but the bulk of her time, after she gave up acting in 1789, was devoted to reading and writing. Two novels, A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796) followed a clutch of successful plays, including Lovers' Vows, which caused so much trouble for the Bertram children in Mansfield Park.
Mrs Inchbald kept diaries throughout her life and there were probably fifty-one altogether, but only eleven are known to survive, stretching from
1776 to 1820, with a concentration in the earlier period (six volumes between
1776-1788) and a sampling between 1793 and 1820. Fragile and hard to read - even her contemporaries complained about Mrs Inchbald's "cramped" handwriting - they are preserved in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. Scholars have used them: Annibel Jenkins's biography of Mrs Inchbald, I'll Tell You What
(2003) follows them faithfully, rightly considering them an unrivalled source not just for Mrs Inchbald's life but for social, theatre, and literary history.
