Joanna Baillie

11 September 1762 - 23 February 1851

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.

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
Textual Production	Lucy Aikin	LA memoir of Anna Letitia Barbauld , in her edition of Barbauld's Works, June 1825, represents a well-planned if largely unsuccessful attempt to establish and preserve Barbauld's reputation after systemic attack by political conservatives...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Clara Balfour	In her general overview of the history of English literature during these centuries, she focuses especially on English poets because as she says, great poets not only give form, power and beauty to a nation's...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Anne Bannerman	The contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch and another based on Goethe 's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...
Literary responses	Anne Bannerman	After her death AB was quickly forgotten. Yet literary historian Stuart Curran has recently noted the influence of her poetry on Dorothea Primrose Campbell . Critic Adriana Craciun , writing for the website Scottish Women...
Friends, Associates	Anna Letitia Barbauld	Joanna Baillie , who lived near the Barbaulds in Hampstead, was one of ALB 's greatest friends. In Barbauld's later years her friends included Samuel Rogers , Madame D'Arblay , Eliza Fletcher (who first visited...
Literary responses	Anna Letitia Barbauld	Though the first review to appear, in the Monthly Repository, expressed admiration (and some anti-war feeling), McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 476 other responses were disapproving, even vitriolic. Many cited the allegedly unpatriotic tendency of the poem in terms...
Textual Features	Anna Letitia Barbauld	ALB draws on Hannah More , her niece Lucy Aikin , and (anonymously) Joanna Baillie . She is even-handed in that she includes six excerpts from James Fordyce 's Sermons to Young Women, a...
Friends, Associates	Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger	Having already praised many contemporary women writers in print, EOB was now able to meet them. The move to London was accomplished principally through the zealous friendship of Miss Sarah Wesley , who had already...
Friends, Associates	Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger	The guests included Joanna Baillie , Jane Porter (both mentioned as celebrities) and Eliza Fenwick . Robinson, Henry Crabb. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence. Editor Sadler, Thomas, 3rd ed., Macmillan, 1872, 2 vols. 199-200 Robinson, Henry Crabb. Diary.
Anthologization	Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger	Joanna Baillie chose two of EOB 's poems for inclusion in her Collection of Poems, published in early 1823. Baillie, Joanna, editor. A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823. Lucy Aikin 's memoir of Benger (as published in one of its subject's works after...
Textual Production	Mary Berry	Few letters survive among those which both sisters wrote regularly to Horace Walpole during the late 1780s; his to them appear as volumes 11 and 12 in the Yale edition of his correspondence. Mary also...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Mary Berry	Like most of her correspondents, Berry is somewhat wordy, given to tiptoeing round the nuances of sentiment. Her letters to Walpole, like his to her, are divided between professions of affection and the endless chronicle...
Textual Production	Mary Berry	Anne Damer had been encouraging MB to keep working on her play as early as December 1793. In December 1795 it was complete enough for her to show it to a friend, the mathematician John Playfair
Textual Production	Mary Berry	She had perhaps begun to form this intention as early as 7 May 1797, when she noted her desire to preserve her memories of these turbulent and alarming times. Berry, Mary. Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry. Editor Lewis, Lady Theresa, Longmans, Green, 1865, 3 vols. 2: 22 In 1821 Joanna Baillie
Literary responses	Mary Berry	The sculptor Richard Westmacott wrote to MB expressing regret at the lack of attention paid her historical work, and contrasting it with the fashion for female gothic by, for instance, Charlotte Dacre (Rosa Matilda...

Timeline

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Texts

Baillie, Joanna. The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie, 1762-1851. Editor Breen, Jennifer, Manchester University Press, 1999.