<DIV><b>A Simple Story</b> by the actress, playwright and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald has remained enduringly popular and almost continuously in print since its first publication in 1791. <p> In scenes charged with understated erotic tension it tells the stories of the flirtatious Miss Milner who falls in love with her guardian, a Roman Catholic priest and aristocrat, and of their daughter Matilda who, banished from her father's sight, craves his love. <p> In her use of dramatic methods?expressive gestures, delayed revelations and economical dialogues?to present these two versions of the same power-struggle between an older father-lover figure and a young girl, Inchbald achieves a psychological intensity and subtlety of characterization rarely found in other late eighteenth-century novelists. </div>