Like Elizabeth Inchbald, Elizabeth Griffith was a professional actress who later had success as a playwright and novelist. Her plays mix conventional comedy with sentiment, topical satire, and explicit didactic advice to women. Like her Georgian contemporaries, Hugh Kelly and Richard Cumberland, she wrote comedy descended from the earlier English exemplary comedy of Colley Cibber and Richard Steele but given new life by the sentimental and enlightenment commitments of the 1760s and 1770s in both England and France. Those modern historians of the drama who have mentioned her plays have generally found them undistinguished, often dramatically inept and tediously sententious; her contemporaries gave her plays more mixed reviews, sometimes complaining about poor plotting or lack of incident, but usually finding her sentiments and her morals admirable. Domestic issues, particularly the proper conduct of wives and husbands, important in many Georgian comedies, are especially so to Griffith, who endeavored...