SOURCE: "Masquerade and Utopia II: Inchbald's A Simple Story," in Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, Stanford University Press, 1986, pp. 290-330.

In the essay that follows, Castle characterizes A Simple Story as subversive because it both uses and mocks sentimental literary conventions.

Moving from [Fanny] Burney's novel to Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, one travels a great distance. Inchbald offers the reader a new terrain, a fictional world that has been utterly transformed. The difference is in part aesthetic. [Burney's] Cecilia, for all its interest, can scarcely be called an artistic success. The work is at once constricted and over-elaborate, hesitant and diffuse. Five volumes extenuate the underlying imaginative dilemma: Burney's language manages to seem both dilated and emotionally imprecise. The style of Cecilia is the linguistic equivalent of anomie: clichéd, bleached out, the rhetoric of enervation. Despair speaks here in the...