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 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...
Literary responses Camilla Crosland
CC enjoyed moderate success during her life. Her writings earned her a modest income (in the 1840s it was about fifty pounds a year) and the critics were generally complimentary.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
A review in the Morning...
Literary responses Frances Burney
The Memoirsdid not win critical acclaim,
Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
378
though Joanna Baillie and her sister, who had known many of the people depicted in the memoirs, enjoyed them immensely, especially FB 's juvenile letters. Baillie, who...
Literary responses Catherine Gore
These poems were shown to Joanna Baillie , who admired them.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
Its appearance in Blackwood's was accompanied by critic John Wilson 's assertion, Scotland has her Baillie —Ireland her Tighe —England her Hemans.
Hemans, Felicia. “Introduction”. Records of Woman, edited by Paula R. Feldman, University Press of Kentucky, 1999, p. xi - xxxiii.
xvi
James Hogg , another contestant, praised the poem.
Hemans, Felicia. “Introduction”. Records of Woman, edited by Paula R. Feldman, University Press of Kentucky, 1999, p. xi - xxxiii.
xvi
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...
Literary responses Mary Tighe
As soon as it was brought to public attention (as the work of a woman who had died tragically young), Psyche attracted a rush of attention. The Quarterly Review accorded Tighe high praise as being...
Literary responses Catherine Gore
Joanna Baillie some years later remembered reading The Bond and finding it very striking . . . finely worked up, and beautifully written.
Grey, Barbarina Charlotte, Lady. A Family Chronicle. Editor Lyster, Gertrude, John Murray, 1908.
146
Baillie read Dacre of the South in late 1837, before it...
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)...
Literary responses Catherine Fanshawe
Nearly twenty years after CF died, Mary Russell Mitford 's Recollections of a Literary Life supplied the first public comment on her; the publication also included four poems by Fanshawe that had previously appeared in...
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...
Literary responses Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
Joanna Baillie thought this the most stage-worthy of her friend's plays, if not the best in other respects.
Grey, Barbarina Charlotte, Lady. A Family Chronicle. Editor Lyster, Gertrude, John Murray, 1908.
30-1, 39
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
Literary responses Mary Somerville
The text was praised by Maria Edgeworth for hav[ing] enlarged my conception of the sublimity of the universe, beyond any ideas I had ever before been enable to form.
qtd. in
Somerville, Mary. Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville. Editor Somerville, Martha, 1815 - 1879, Roberts Brothers, 1874.
204
After reading the preliminary dissertation,...
Literary responses Anna Brownell Jameson
Reviewers noted the fact that it was a woman who had set out on this bold journey. Christian Isobel Johnstone 's review in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine was fairly typical in suggesting that that Winter Studies...

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