ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for fine-grained attention to the contemporary literary discourses and the particularities of Elizabeth Inchbald's historical, political and religious context in order to understand the complex ideological and intellectual interplay of Catholicism and Enlightenment in James her plays and novels. It discusses more broadly how her intellectual biography intersects, perhaps surprisingly and uniquely, with both English Jacobinism and Catholic Cisalpinism, or what Joseph Chinnici has labeled the "English Catholic Enlightenment" in his study of the English Catholic historian John Lingard. Even as Nature and Art is a quintessential "Jacobin Novel" that associates Inchbald with the "Radical Enlightenment" in England, those labels are not comprehensive enough either for that work or for Inchbald's mind. Not fully part of the English Jacobins because of her religion and not entirely part of English Cisalpinism due to her gender and political focus, Inchbald occupies a pivotal space as an English Catholic woman writer.
