When Miss Milner announces her passion for her guardian, a Catholic priest, she breaks through the double barrier of religious vocation and society's standards of `proper' womanly behaviour. Her love is legitimized when Dorriforth is released from his vows, but she finds her own unorthodox nature cannot conform to a marriage where her husband continues to be a stern moral guide. With a sureness of touch that prefigures Jane Austen, Elizabeth Inchbald shows that thereis no simple answer to their predicament, and that their conflict can only be resolved in the next generation.