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....

Yet there was a sentence in the letter, that, worse than all the tenderness left out, wounded her sensibility; and she could not read the line, GRATITUDE FOR ALL THE FAVOURS CONFERRED ON ME, without turning pale with horror, then kindling with indignation at the commonplace thanks, which insultingly reminded her of her innocence given in exchange for unmeaning acknowledgments....