ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Inchbald, Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are (ed. Daniel O’Quinn, University of Guelph)
Elizabeth Inchbald was widely considered one of the foremost comic playwrights of her generation and Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are is perhaps her most complex five-act comedy. A meditation on the perils of the marriage market, the play offers a feminist intervention on governance that lies somewhere between Wollstonecraft and Hays’s radical critique of patriarchal privilege and Edgeworth’s reformist domestic rhetoric. The play also offers one of the most extended examinations of masculinist violence in all of late eighteenth-century cultural production.
