Joanna Baillie

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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.
Engraving of Joanna Baillie, circa 1800, seated against a draped background. Her white headscarf contrasts with the dark background.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Appreciation of FH was slowly growing. Following on the positive responses from Scott and Byron , in October 1820John Taylor Coleridge in the influential Quarterly Review (published by John Murray , her own publisher)...
Intertextuality and Influence Felicia Hemans
The volume cost nine shillings and sixpence, and when the edition of 1,000 sold out, FH 's share of the profits split with John Murray was £66. According to recent editors of the text, the...
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
The play's debut was disappointing. It closed after a single night, though it was remounted with greater success in Edinburgh the following April with Harriet Siddons in a major role (having been recruited at Joanna Baillie
Intertextuality and Influence Felicia Hemans
The volume takes its epigraphs and historical starting-points from a wide range of sources, including major male Romantics—Wordsworth , Byron , Coleridge , Goethe , Schiller —and lesser-known contemporaries including women—Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Joanna Baillie found some exquisite things in this volume, written with FH 's own peculiar strain of melancholy tenderness. . . . Aye, woman becomes a most-noble & generous being, painted by her hand!
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
2: 709
Intertextuality and Influence Felicia Hemans
Scenes and Hymns of Life includes Prisoners' Evening Service, which imagines the last days of two prisoners awaiting execution during the French Revolution, and affectingly described by Helen Maria Williams .
qtd. in
Duquette, Natasha Aleksiuk. Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Approach to Biblical Interpretation. Pickwick Publications, 2016.
167n3
Even...
Literary responses Isabel Hill
A notice in The London Magazine favourably compared The Poet's Child to Joanna Baillie 's writing, and described its use of language as simple, in exceedingly pure taste, and at times eminently beautiful.
Hill, Benson Earle. “Memoir of the Late Isabel Hill”. The Monthly Magazine, Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, Feb. 1842.
182
Literary responses Margaret Holford
Walter Scott never answered when Holford sent him a copy of Wallace for comment, and was apparently scathing about the poem in remarks made privately to Joanna Baillie.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
1: 328
Early the next year Baillie
Literary responses Margaret Holford
The reception of this second long poem was far less favourable than that of Wallace. The Monthly Review denied it literary merit while granting it some potential literary-historical interest. The poem was, wrote the...
Literary responses Margaret Holford
Joanna Baillie , to whom the author sent the volume, liked it on the first reading, and still better on the second. She found the title poem truly beautiful, full of striking & pleasing, melancholy...
Dedications Margaret Holford
She dated her dedication to Joanna Baillie on 18 May from Hendon Place. Baillie had thanked her for the honour on the 15th. The novel was reviewed in August. French and German translations quickly...
Reception Margaret Holford
Mary Russell Mitford called this novel an attempt to portray the poet Byron , recognisable through several anecdotes familiarly told about him, in very black and exaggerated colors. She maintained that Joanna Baillie , as...
Literary responses Margaret Holford
Baillie read this translation aloud to her sister , and found it a very interesting work, simple, clear & the characters forcibly & impartially drawn, easier to follow than a longer history. Even as non-Spanish-speakers...
Textual Production Margaret Holford
After her marriage Margaret Hodson published through John Murray in 1827 a volume of hymns designed especially for those facing death, written or else collected by herself. In September that year Joanna Baillie thanked her...
Literary responses Margaret Holford
Baillie praised the language of Holford's hymns as beautiful if perhaps a little too oriental,and the thoughts just & elevated & appropriate to the awful situation for which they are intended.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
2: 601
Her...

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