When Miss Milner announces her passion for her guardian, a Catholic priest, she breaks through the double barrier of his religious vocation and her society's standards of proper womanly behaviour. Her love is legitimized when Dorriforth is released from his vows, but her own unorthodox nature cannot be contained by a marriage where her husband continues to be a stern moral guide. Elizabeth Inchbald is concerned with the question of a woman's 'proper education' and in a novel whose sureness of touch and subtlety of characterization prefigure Jane Austen's work, she shows that there is no simple answer.