Nature and Art

Nature and Art is the 1796 second novel by Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821), the English actress, playwright, and novelist who rose from a Suffolk farm family to become one of the most successful women writers of the Georgian theatre. The short novel contrasts two cousins, one raised in worldly corruption and one in natural simplicity on an African island, and uses their colliding fortunes to attack the artificial ranks, clerical hypocrisy, and legal cruelty of English society, building to the famous scene in which the corrupted cousin, now a judge, sentences to death the woman he once seduced and abandoned. Written in the radical decade of the 1790s, the novel belongs with Godwin’s Caleb Williams in the Jacobin fiction of social protest. Inchbald’s first novel A Simple Story is its companion in lasting reputation. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.