spanned seventeen years. She appeared in many classical roles and in new plays such as Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem. She died on 1 August 1821 in Kensington and is buried in the churchyard of St Mary Abbots. Her gravestone calls her one "whose writings will be cherished while truth, simplicity, and feelings, command public admiration." In 1833, a two-volume Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald by James Boaden was published by Richard Bentley. Written work While relatively unknown as an actress, after her husband's death Inchbald went on to become a celebrated playwright and author. Her success as a writer meant she did not need a spouse's financial support, and she did not remarry. Her literary career began with pieces in The Artist and the Edinburgh Review. Between 1784 and 1805, nineteen of her comedies, sentimental dramas, and farces, many of them translations from French or German originals, were performed in London theatres. Her first play to be produced was A Mogul Tale, with her in the lead female role of Selina. In 1780, she joined the Covent Garden Company and played the breeches role of Bellario in Philaster. Her plays were also produced at the Haymarket Theatre. She wrote between twenty-one and twenty-three plays — the exact number is disputed — and eighteen were published. She is probably best known in the twenty-first century for her two novels, A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796). A political radical and friend of William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, her beliefs are clearer in her novels than in her plays, due to constrictions on the patent theatres of Georgian London, though even there she took risks. "Inchbald's life was marked by tensions between, on the one hand, political radicalism, a passionate nature evidently attractive to a number of her admirers, and a love of independence, and on the other hand, a desire for social respectability and a strong sense of the emotional attraction of authority figures." One critic describes the complexity of her writing as "richly textured with strands of resistance, boldness, and libidinal thrills". An example of this contradictory impulse may be seen in her biography when, despite their shared political beliefs, she quarrelled publicly with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, when Wollstonecraft's marriage to William Godwin made it clear that she had not been married to Gilbert Imlay, the father of her elder daughter Fanny. This incident was deeply resented