A Simple Story

When Miss Milner announces her passion for her guardian, a Catholic priest, she breaks through the double barrier of religious vocation and society's standards of `proper' womanly behaviour. Her love is legitimized when Dorriforth is released from his vows, but she finds her own unorthodox nature cannot conform to a marriage where her husband continues to be a stern moral guide. With a surenees of touch that prefigures Jane Austen, Elizabeth Inchbald shows that there is no simple answer to their predicament, and that their conflict can only be resolved in the next generation.
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The late J.M.S. Tompkins edited the OEN text from which edition derives Jane Spencer is a lecturer in English at the University of Edinburgh. Her other publications include The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Blackwell, 1986). Her introduction to A Simple Story reconsiders Elizabeth Inchbald in the light of current feminist thinking.