Elizabeth Inchbald, Inventor of the Catholic Novel

While the “Catholic novel” is a recognized subgenre—associated above all, in the twentieth century, with Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene—there is no agreement on what exactly makes a novel Catholic. But it is clear that the Catholic novel is not simply a novel written by an author who happens to be Catholic; nor is it merely a didactic exercise, intended to present the Catholic faith under the guise of a novel. Catholic novels are, rather, deeply infused by Catholic themes because those themes genuinely mattered to their authors, because Catholicism was a part of their being. But if we are seeking an origin for the Catholic novel in the English language, we should not turn to Waugh or Greene, but to a much earlier novelist: the often-overlooked Georgian writer Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), author of A Simple Story (1791).

Elizabeth Inchbald was born Elizabeth Simpson to John Simpson and Mary Rushbrook in the Suffolk village of Stanningfield, an unusual rural community that had the highest population of Catholics of any village in eighteenth-century eastern England. The reason for this was the presence of the Rookwood family (notorious for their involvement in the Gunpowder Plot) at nearby Coldham Hall. The Simpsons were Catholic tenant farmers on the lands of this old recusant family, who provided a secret chapel in the hall and patronized the local Jesuit mission in the town of Bury St. Edmunds. One of Bury’s Jesuit priests, James Dennett, was the inspiration for the wise Jesuit Sanford in A Simple Story; and it seems likely that Dennett tutored the young Elizabeth, who would have had access to the huge Catholic library of Coldham Hall. 

Elizabeth was a restless spirit, however, and at the age of eighteen she went to London to seek her fortune as an actress, marrying her fellow Catholic actor Joseph Inchbald shortly afterward. But after her husband’s sudden death in 1779, Elizabeth turned from acting to writing plays, eighteen of which were published. Indeed, her play Lovers’ Vows is featured in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park. As novels grew in popularity toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, Inchbald turned to this new form and wrote A Simple Story and Nature and Art (1796).

A Simple Story was very successful upon its publication. Divided into four volumes, it has a strong claim to be considered the first Catholic novel in English on the basis that it is written by a Catholic and features Catholic characters. It is not immediately obvious, however, that the novel’s themes are specifically Catholic. Indeed, the story seems at first glance to be subverting clerical celibacy: It follows the love between a Catholic priest, Dorriforth, and his ward, seventeen-year-old Miss Milner. On closer inspection, however, what Inchbald is really subverting are the anti-Catholic expectations of the era’s readers. Dorriforth is faithful to his vow of celibacy and only marries Miss Milner when, on inheriting a noble title from a relative, he receives a papal dispensation from the priesthood. The characters of Dorriforth and Sanford, both Catholic priests who are presented as normal (and even noble) men, stand in contrast to the Gothic fantasies of the novelist Ann Radcliffe, Inchbald’s contemporary, whose pages were stalked by anti-Catholic stereotypes of tyrannical priests and deranged, flagellating friars.

A Simple Story is, on the face of it, a genteel, moralizing novel of manners. Set in historical context, however, Inchbald’s portrayal of Catholics as normal members of the rural gentry and aristocracy (inspired by her own upbringing among the Catholic gentry of Suffolk) was radical. Although the penal laws against Catholics had long since ceased to be enforced, it was only in 1791, the year the book was published, that discreet Catholic chapels became legal—provided they had the appearance of domestic dwellings. The popular Gothic genre fed an appetite for Catholics as objects of prurient fascination, and the press portrayed Catholics as Irish barbarians or Mediterranean fanatics. But Inchbald implicitly offered a plea for Catholics to be recognized simply as fellow Britons—normal people, with the same social, romantic, and moral aspirations as their Protestant fellow subjects. 

A Simple Story is well known today to scholars of women’s literature, and Inchbald is best known as an early female playwright and novelist—a predecessor and trailblazer for the likes of Jane Austen and George Eliot. However, Inchbald’s Catholicity cannot be ignored; it can be found on every page of her work, in her Catholic characters and the moral conundrums they face. As such, A Simple Story deserves to be remembered above all as the English language’s first Catholic novel, and Inchbald as its inventor.

Francis Young is a British historian and folklorist. 

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Image by Thomas Lawrence, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via the public domain. Image cropped.