Joanna Baillie
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) was one of the first Scotswomen to write for the stage, although her plays have rarely been performed. Her father was a Presbyterian clergyman and she had little exposure to the theatre as a child. Indeed, she reputedly did not learn to read until she was ten. By contrast, her brother Matthew studied medicine, and when he inherited property from their uncle, famed anatomist William Hunter, the family moved to London. There, Baillie kept house for her brother until his marriage in 179. After a series of moves, she settled in Hampstead in 1802, where she would spend the rest of her long life.
In London, Baillie mingled with the likes of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Maria Edgeworth. Her first book of verse, Poems: Wherein it is attempted to describe certain views of nature and of rustic manners, was published in 1790. As its title suggests, the book had a similar aim to William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1789)—to describe the natural world and human nature without recourse to clichéd conventions. In 1791, Baillie began to write what would eventually become Plays on the Passions, published in three volumes between 1798 and 1812. The plays illustrate Baillie’s interest in moral philosophy and what we would now call psychology, as each explored the development of a specific emotion, whether love, hatred, ambition, fear or hope. In her Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821), which tells the stories of historical figures including Lady Grizel Baillie and William Wallace, Baillie brought her dramatic flair to long verse.
Bibliography
Judith Bailey Slagle, Joanna Baillie, A Literary Life (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002)
Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays, ed. by Thomas C. Crochunis (New York: Routledge, 2004)