In The Gentleman's Magazine for March, 1791, some one wrote of A Simple Story:
"She has struck out a path entirely her own. She has disdained to follow the steps of her predecessors, and to construct a new novel, as is too commonly done, out of the scraps and fragments of earlier inventors. Her principal character, the Roman Catholic lord, is perfectly new: and she has conducted him, through a series of surprising well-contrasted adventures, with an uniformity of character and truth of description that have rarely been surpassed."
There is, however, one hackneyed scene. A young girl is seized, thrust into a chariot, and carried at full speed to a lonely place. There is hardly an early novel where this bald incident is not worked up into one or more chapters, with variations to suit the convenience of the plot. It was as much a part of the stock in trade of the novelist of the eighteenth century as a family quarrel is of the twentieth. With this exception, A Simple Story is new in its plot, incidents, characters, and mode of treatment. Emotion did not play so important a part in a novel again until Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre.
Mrs. Inchbald's only other novel, Nature and Art, shows the artificialities of society. Two cousins, William and Henry, are contrasted. William is the son of a dean. Henry's father went to Africa to live, whence he sent his son to his rich uncle to be educated. Henry fails to comprehend the society in which he finds himself placed, and cannot understand that there should be any poor people.
"'Why, here is provision enough for all the people,' said Henry; 'why should they want? why do not they go and take some of these things?'
"'They must not,' said the dean, 'unless they were their own.'
"'What, Uncle! Does no part of the earth, nor anything which the earth produces, belong to the poor?'"
His uncle fails to answer this question to his nephew's satisfaction.
The vices and the fawning duplicity of William are contrasted with the virtues and independent spirit of Henry.
"'I know I am called proud,' one day said William to Henry.