A Chat With A. Natasha Joukovsky about Elizabeth Inchbald's "A Simple Story"
Relevant to this exchange: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and a mild defense of Edmund Bertram.
MRS. PRICE: Too many children
Too many children Portsmouth help
Mail son away
Send son away via mail
A. Natasha Joukovsky’s new novel, Medium Rare, a modern retelling of the myth of Icarus about prophesy, fame, and basketball, was published earlier this year by Melville House. She is also the author of The Portrait of a Mirror, a short story in Thirty Cabins, sundry nonfiction, and a “quite useless” newsletter.
I admire Natasha’s work exceedingly. I sent her a message on Instagram a week or two ago because I thought she would have interesting things to say about Elizabeth Inchbald, one of my favorite eighteenth-century authors (and, if you require further justification, a significant influence on Austen), and asked if she would consider reading A Simple Story so we could chat about it. A Simple Story follows the successful, then unsuccessful, love story between Dorriforth (a Catholic!) and his ward Miss Milner, then the unsuccessful, then successful, parental relationship between Dorriforth (now Lord Elmwood) and his daughter by the disgraced Miss M., Matilda.
Our correspondence follows:
Dear Sir,
It was good of you to solicit my thoughts on Elizabeth Inchbald for—if memory serves—“one million dollars” via Instagram. While I endeavor to insulate my literary efforts from overt pecuniary manipulation, flattering hyperbole fortunately bears no such personal constraint, and I am pleased to comply. I have read the novels of Mrs. Inchbald with relish. Her debut, A Simple Story, I found not so simple; Nature and Art, a philosophical feast. But let me not presume to understand the precise nature of your inquiries when—
I have the honor to be,
Sir,
with regard to this conversation,
your most humble, and
most obedient servant,
ANJ
I won’t try to maintain Inchbald’s style, mostly because I have only recently recovered from a familywide bout of Covid and because I fear I have a tin ear for that sort of thing. But I would gladly give a million dollars, if I had it, for your thoughts on Inchbald’s style, if only because I first came to enjoy your writing through your Austen Math series:
The four primary dimensions predict total status via uneven weight distribution, in alignment with the hierarchy of Austen’s values as I have long understood them:
MORALS - 40%
FORTUNE - 30%
MANNERS - 20%
FUCKABILITY - 10%
for a total of 100%.
The formula to calculate total estimated Austenian status is a basic SUMPRODUCT: D1*W1 + D2*W2 + D3*W3 + D4*W4, where D=dimensional raw score and W=Austenian weight.
III. Secondary dimension calculations
Each pair of congruous primary dimensions yields insights into asecondary dimension. At the intersection
of FORTUNE and MORALS is WORTH,
of MORALS and MANNERS is CHARACTER,
of MANNERS and FUCKABILITY is AFFECT,
and of FUCKABILITY and FORTUNE is ELIGIBILITY.
I ought to point out here that Elizabeth Inchbald was someone Jane Austen certainly read and admired, and whose play Lovers’ Vows features so prominently in Mansfield Park. But it’s her funny little Catholic version of Wuthering Heights, A Simple Story, that I wanted to talk about with you.
I was thinking of Inchbald in this context in particular, since A Simple Story strikes me as a purely mathematical one. (I graduated without honors from an evangelical Christian college with a degree in English literature and a minor in biblical studies, you will forgive me if I misrepresent pure mathematics here.) It’s just hearts and numbers talking to one another, is what I mean.
Strachey wrote the introduction of my edition of A Simple Story:
“Compared with A Simple Story even the narrow canvases of Jane Austen seem spacious pictures of diversified life. Mrs. Inchbald’s novel is not concerned with the world at large, or with any section of society, hardly even with the family; its subject is a group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the whole business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity of detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in A Simple Story, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may well blind him to high intrinsic merits.”
I did not think you would be blind to its merits! Would you tell me what you thought some of its merits were?
Sincerely,
Danny
Okay, Danny—but the idea that you have a tin ear for faux eighteenth-century formality is ridiculous. I have been reading your books, and the author of Texts from Jane Eyre does not have a tin ear. I’m just as happy to switch, though; contemporary style may prove more appropriate for handing Lytton Strachey his ass.
I went and read his introduction to A Simple Story to understand the quotation above in context, and it’s like an ur-text for how to create a literary environment systematically hostile to its merits as I see them. He kicks things off by comparatively bashing Frances Burney’s magnificent debut, Evelina. Great to know it was “still widely read” in 1908—Burney cannot be read enough—but the entire posture feels animated by the same vicious presumption of period quotas on canonical female novelists that Rebecca Romney’s recent book, Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, so persuasively resists.
Even in praising Inchbald and Austen, Strachey manages to undercut them. The “narrow canvases” of Austen’s tableaux are a feature, not a bug—and I wouldn’t say Inchbald’s are actually narrower. Characters banished from and even fully outside the gentry—adulterers, musicians, prostitutes—can take center stage. Unlike, say, Maria Bertram, whose fall ushers her swiftly off, Miss Milner is not only permitted to remain, but to remain a figure of more pathos than derision. This, more than twenty years earlier. Oh, and he gives credit for “part of the plot of A Simple Story“ to William Godwin because “it is said” (by ??) that he suggested it.
I think Austen is the GOAT (of any sex), but she did not write in a vacuum. As in the case of Burney, Austen’s comparison to Inchbald should be celebrated to their mutual standalone benefit. If the high-ironic style so often attributed to Austen is frequently indistinguishable from Burney’s prose, the idea that Austen invented imperfect heroines must, with A Simple Story, fall similarly by the wayside. Inchbald’s greatest merits exist not, as Strachey suggests, “in spite of” her “artificialities,” but in the depth of character her so-called artificialities allow—in the novelistic truths of her insights; in the psychological and philosophical dramas of her pointed parallelisms.
Inchbald’s style is also very good. She can be quite epigrammatic (”But alas! in the exercise of the arts, industry scarce bears the name of merit.”) and her dialogue in particular often zings—but I wouldn’t say it’s as groundbreaking as her depictions of women as full-blown human beings. Miss Milner in particular: vain, alluring, so inescapably subject to taboo desires. Falling in love with a Catholic priest! In 1791! Delicious.
I realize I probably haven’t adequately addressed the mathematical side of things—could you say more about what you mean by “hearts and numbers talking to one another,” please?
Very best,
Natasha
Let us say that I know enough to realize that I do not know enough to write in such a style that would satisfy me. I will not, however, throw back the compliments I have fished from you; they are more than big enough, and will keep.
