Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Joanna Baillie
-
Standard Name: Baillie, Joanna
Birth Name: Joanna Baillie
Nickname: Jack
Self-constructed Name: Mrs Joanna Baillie
JB
is best known for her stylistically and thematically innovative drama, published from 1798 and through the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Her poetry is now also beginning to be appreciated and a scholarly edition of her letters is available in print and on line. She also published a poetry anthology. Whether regarded from the viewpoint of Scotland or that of London, she is one of the important writers of her generation.
Again her work was extremely popular. The French translation was banned by Napoleon
because of its portrayal of nationalist resistance to conquest.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
When the curtain rose Kean
(possibly drunk) appeared to have lost his memory, and his power of action.—The other Performers became disconcerted in their parts . . . the whole became a chaos of uproar...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Jane Pfeiffer
The poem is framed by a substantial first-person prose narrative about a party of people visiting the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland. The speaker, evidently EJP
herself, relates how her...
Health
Eliza Parsons
Splinters of bone were still at that time working their way out through her skin. She believed that the physician John Hunter
(uncle of Joanna Baillie
) saved her life.
Parsons, Eliza. Letter to William Windham, 14 May [1794]. http://BL Add M3 37914.
Textual Features
Carola Oman
She notes that the writer Anne Grant
was the first person known to have applied the wizard title to Scott, though she is unable actually to credit her as its originator.
Oman, Carola. The Wizard of the North. Hodder and Stoughton.
Her subjects here include such comparatively well-known authors as Joanna Baillie
, Anne Grant
, and Margaret Oliphant
, and also the almost unknown diarist and novelist Margaret Calderwood
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Grisell Murray
The preface comments that GM
's detailed writing about her mother was instrumental in inspiring Joanna Baillie
's ballad about Grisell Baillie in Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters.
Murray, Grisell. Memoirs of the Lives and Characters of the Right Honourable George Baillie of Jerviswood and of Lady Grisell Baillie.
Among her earlier literary friends, MRM
wrote with particular warmth of Barbara Hofland
(with whom she stayed in London for the first night of her play Julian), Eleanor Porden
, and Joanna Baillie
...
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research.
116: 195
Pigrome, Stella. “Mary Russell Mitford”. The Charles Lamb Bulletin, Vol.
66
, Charles Lamb Society, pp. 53-62.
54
It...
Textual Production
Mary Russell Mitford
It seems that MRM
first caught the ambition of being a writer from her teacher Frances Arabella Rowden
. Her early letters about her own poetry are also largely concerned with Rowden's Pleasures of Friendship...
Literary responses
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's plays were admired by Maria Edgeworth
, Joanna Baillie
, and Felicia Hemans
, though John Genest
(in Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 1832), judged them dull.
Textual Features
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Alice Meynell
Many of the essays reprinted here focus on women writers who were, to put it mildly, little known to the public in the 1940s. These included: Anna Seward
and Joanna Baillie
, as well as...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Martineau
HM
's social circle vastly expanded at this time until she knew virtually all the prominent people, particularly the political men, of her day. As she recorded in her Autobiography, however, she refused to...
