[Gutenberg 22002] • A Simple Story

When Miss Milner announces her passion for her guardian, a Catholic priest, she breaks through the double barrier of his religious vocation and 18th-century British society's standards of proper womanly behavior. Like other women writers of her time, Elizabeth Inchbald concentrates on the question of a woman's "proper education," and her sureness of touch and subtlety of characterization prefigure Jane Austen's work.