SOURCE: "Critic and Historian of the British Drama," in Elizabeth Inchbald: England's Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th-century London, University Press of America, 1987, pp. 127-45.

In the essay that follows, Manvell examines Inchbald's critical prefaces to The British Theatre—a collection of British drama from Shakespeare to the end of the eighteenth century—claiming that her interpretations generally reflect conventional social values of her time.

By the turn of the century Elizabeth Inchbald had become one of the most respected of writers in the mainstream of literary output in England. It was a transitional period in English writing, with the powerful influence of the French revolution of the 1790s only too evident, like a sting in the tail. In an age that seemed to enjoy both writing and reading literary and dramatic criticism on a higher level than the immediate and ephemeral reports in...