Jonty Claypole

So Elizabeth Ingeborg, she was born in 1753 in Suffolk.

She had an appalling stammer as a child.

Yeah, I sort of wrote about her for a book I wrote on stuttering.

She had an appalling stammer.

And despite this, she decided she was going to be an actor.

And she effectively sort of ran away from home when she was 18.

She went to London.

and joined a theatre.

She had a pretty appalling time.

She was sexually harassed at the theatre she was working in by both the stage manager and the theatre manager.

So she wasn't really safe anywhere in the building.

And after two months in London, she married a fellow actor at the theatre called Joseph Inchbald.

And it's thought it was probably a marriage of convenience in order to get these other men off her.

He was twice her age, Joseph Inchbald, and had two children.

And they, through the 1770s, had this very bohemian itinerant life, traveling around Europe and through Britain, performing in rep companies.

Then Joseph died in 1779.

And Elizabeth Inchbald, like Charlotte Smith, like so many of the other women we've been talking about, needed to earn more money.

And she turned to writing to do so.

She wrote many plays, including Lover's Vows, which I mentioned.

She became a good friend of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.