Elizabeth Inchbald (née Simpson, 15 October 1753 – 1 August 1821) was an English novelist, actress, dramatist, and translator.

[3] Focused on acting from a young age, she worked hard to manage her stammer, but her family discouraged an attempt in early 1770 to gain a position at the Norwich Theatre.

[4][3] Two months after her arrival in London, in June, she agreed to marry a fellow Catholic, actor Joseph Inchbald (1735–1779), possibly at least in part for protection.

In October 1772, the couple began a demanding tour in Scotland with West Digges's theatre company that continued for almost four years.

They returned to Britain and moved to Liverpool where Inchbald, after joining Joseph Younger's company, met actors Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble, both of whom became important friends.

[6] Between 1784 and 1805, nineteen of her comedies, sentimental dramas, and farces, many of them translations from French or German originals, were performed in London theatres.

A political radical and friend of William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, her beliefs are clearer in her novels than in her plays, due to constrictions on the patent theatres of Georgian London,[7] though even there she took risks.

"[3] One critic describes the complexity of her writing as "richly textured with strands of resistance, boldness, and libidinal thrills".

Lovers' Vows (1798) was subsequently featured as a focus of moral controversy by Jane Austen in her novel Mansfield Park (1814).

[17] Her two novels have been frequently reprinted and American critic Terry Castle called her A Simple Story "the most elegant English fiction of the eighteenth century".