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 Anna Seward
Scott confided to Joanna Baillie after AS 's death that he had developed a most unsentimental horror for her sentimental letters while he was receiving them.
qtd. in
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931.
252
Of much comment after their publication, Lady Charlotte Bury
Literary responses Catherine Fanshawe
CF 's immediately posthumous reputation rested, like her writings themselves, on oral tradition. She had the admiration of William Cowper and Walter Scott , as well as Joanna Baillie , Anne Grant , and Mary Berry
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.
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
Literary responses Anna Mary Howitt
The earlier set of illustrations was warmly praised by Joanna Baillie .
Literary responses Dorothea Primrose Campbell
Joanna Baillie assured DPC that she and her sister had been sufficiently impressed to go back and re-read several parts of the novel.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, 2 vols.
2: 1159
Literary responses Susan Ferrier
Again SF met with success on balance. The Athenæum, however, naming Miss Ferriar as author, stated that the success of Marriage, backed by the good-natured commendation of Sir Walter Scott , induced the...
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...
Literary responses Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
Joanna Baillie , while she liked the Burns imitations as poetry, observed that the Scots idiom was not quite right.
Grey, Barbarina Charlotte, Lady. A Family Chronicle. Editor Lyster, Gertrude, John Murray, 1908.
39
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 Mary Howitt
Among much critical condemnation of The Seven Temptations (and particular harshness from William Jerdan ),
Woodring, Carl Ray. Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt. University of Kansas Press, 1952.
32
the Athenæum acknowledged that we have gone through the whole volume with sincere pleasure, and judged that MH exhibited...
Literary responses Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
Joanna Baillie thought the dialogue here very clever and natural.
Grey, Barbarina Charlotte, Lady. A Family Chronicle. Editor Lyster, Gertrude, John Murray, 1908.
152
Literary responses Anne Grant
The pension was granted following the petition of Sir Walter Scott (who had praised her writing at the end of Waverley),
Perkins, Pamela. “Anne Grant and the Professionalization of Privacy”. Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750-1850, edited by Emma Clery et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 29-43.
32
Francis Jeffrey , Henry Mackenzie , and others. At first AG rejected...
Literary responses Margaret Holford
She was very disappointed when Scott never acknowledged this tribute. After Wallace appeared, Joanna Baillie wrote to him reminding him of this lapse in manners and implicitly that it was his own fault that Wallace...
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...

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