In its odd two-part format reminiscent of Pamela’s continuing on well past P & B’s nuptials, Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) offers a titillating, then tamed, take on Old and New Testament God(s), biblical themes, and Catholic and Protestant female education. What starts as a bold, reverse-seduction plot narrative of the female, as Austen puts it 12 years later in Northanger Abbey (1803), daring to “dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her” (chapter 3, last paragraph) ends with “And Mr. Milner, Matilda’s grandfather, had better have given his fortune to a distant branch of his family—as Matilda’s father once meant to do—so he had bestowed upon his daughter A PROPER EDUCATION. FINIS” (338). This novel, which starts with the death of Mr. Milner bestowing his daughter into the hands of a Catholic priest/father, proceeds with Miss Milner’s seduction and domination of her adoptive father; the second volume starts with the death of Miss Milner who has become Lady Elmwood entreating this same man, her husband, to “own” his daughter, Lady Matilda, which because of the sins of her mother (adultery), he will not. The sin of the mother is visited upon the daughter; but so are the sins of the father. 

Useful to think about this conundrum the novel creates then reappropriates into the dominant, patriarchal narrative on female education are Old Testament versus from Exodus and Dueteronomy, and (less explicitly so) in the New Testament, 2 Corinthians. Deuteronomy and Exodus display the Old Testament God which is a “jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth [generation] of them that hate me” (Deuteronomy 5:9) and that “will by no means clear [the guilty]; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 34:7). Inchbald’s A Simple Story takes the father’s sin of marrying a protestant woman and visiting God’s “jealous” “iniquity” upon the daughter, Miss Milner, and the granddaughter, Lady Matilda—the third generation. If this is literally to be the case in A Simple Story, then this does not bode well for Lady Matilda and her cousin/questionably betrothed, Rushbrook’s, offspring.

The people living in Lord Elmwood FKA Rushbrook’s house (as Clarissa would write to Lovelace, “my father’s house”) treat him as if he is God, writes Jane Spencer in the Oxford World Classics, 1988 introduction to the text. It is debatable whether, after his daughter is nearly raped, sacrificed a la Clarissa due to his paternal neglect by a Lovelacean rake, this God-like figure of Rushbrook, the priest-turned-Lord-turned-bitter-cuckold, reforms truly into a New Testament God of forgiveness (as in 2 Corinthians 5:17), “Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, [he is] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). 

“Things” are not in fact that “new”; Matilda is not thrilled with the neat, tying-up of the marriage plot that purportedly is her fate. “She loved him as her friend, her cousin, her softer brother, but not as a lover.—The idea of love never once came to her thoughts; and she would sport with Rushbrook like the most harmless child, while he, all impassioned, could with difficulty resist telling her, what she made him suffer” (334). When her father and Rushbrook’s adoptive father cries “with an angry voice and with his countenance disordered” (as it perpetually seems to be in part 2), “Rushbrook has offended me beyond forgiveness” and places all the responsibility on her (336), she is (Catholic) guilted—perhaps—into marrying him, and is not thrilled. “Her hand that had just taken hold of his, in the warmth of her wish to serve him, now dropped down as with the stroke of death—her face lost its colour—and she leaned against the desk by which they were standing, without uttering a word” (337). Now, it is she, the child of Lord and Lady Elmwood, who becomes put into the passive position that her father previously was in, with her mother the aggressor. He asks her, “Do you not wish me happy?” Death plays a role in their courtship ritual that follows; her hand drops “as with the stroke of death”; she says she thinks “we must part” which he manipulates into “Then let us be joined, … till death alone can part us.” Matilda might be a sinner in the hands of an angry God, her father, with her punishment being this out of the frying pan into the fire situation: dealing with the wrath of her father on the one hand, and the inappropriate love/pressure of her adoptive brother slash cousin on the other, she can either “sentence him to misery” or the reader—now gendered as a “he”—“has every reason to suppose their wedded life was a life of happiness.” This is ominous at worst, ambiguous at best, given the fact that volume 1 ended with the reader having “every reason to suppose” the wedded life of her parents would result in “happiness” when, in fact, it ends in adultery and biblical sacrifice of their firstborn. The reader, still a “he”—“has beheld the pernicious effects of an improper education in the destiny which attended the unthinking Miss Milner—On the opposite side, then, what may not be hoped from that school of prudence—though of adversity—in which Matilda was bred?” 

This is messed up. She was brought up after the trauma of losing her mother and her father, by a Catholic priest, impotent to affect/advise her father to kindness towards his own daughter, and the ever-loyal Miss Woodley. She was brought up harboring one of the seven deadly sins, envy, frequently throughout the text toward her father’s new male heir (much the same way as Mrs. Bennett in P & P towards Mr. Collins). While Mr. Rushbrook is not so annoying as Mr. Collins he is impotent, powerless to help save Lady Matilda, just as Theodore is to save his Matilda in Otranto. It is in Matilda’s power to save Theodore (through the trap door in her father’s castle), and Lady Matilda’s to save Rushbrook (also in her father’s castle). Female inheritance issues plague this novel, Clarissa (1748), Otranto (1764), Evelina (1778), Udolpho (1794) (Romance of the Forest, Radcliffe’s third novel, also was published in 1791), and even The Female American (1767), in which Eliza is also forced to marry her cousin who has a passion for her that she does not share. Udolpho’s Emily is similarly ambivalent about her husband, who also fails to save her. In the Female Gothic, to include Clarissa,Evelina and the Female American as forerunners into that camp, the “children” of the patriarchy are construed as daughters. In  Otranto and Clarissa, the daughters are “put to death for their fathers” (Deutoronomy 24:16); in Udolpho and The Female American, the daughters are the inheritors of their fathers’ sins through the travails through which they are put as well as the less-than-adequate men they are virtually forced to marry. In the female Gothic, it is not always the case that “every man is put to death for his own sin” (Deutoronomy 24:16). 

The female protagonists in the Gothic era become scapegoats for the projection of male rage in the form of the overly aggressive Miss Milner/Lady Elmwood and the overly submissive daughter who inherits her adulterous mess that activates the cuckolded patriarch’s unnatural rage. The marriage plot does not “save” them. In harkening readers back to the “sins of the father” theme through female Catholic versus protestant education, Inchbald boldly claims that marriage does not have the power to save/redeem the female who is the inheritor of her father’s, nor her grandfather’s or her mother’s, sins pertaining to “EDUCATION”—“FINIS.” In this way, A Simple Story leaves ambiguous whether Catholic or Protestant, or other type of upbringing/education, is to blame for these women’s patriarchal traumas. Their Exodus from Old Testament wrath to New Testament benevolence is incomplete, perhaps to be accomplished during or after Lady Matilda and Rushmore’s children’s generation. 

Work Cited

Inchbald, Elizabeth. A Simple Story, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins. Oxford World’s Classics, 1988.