Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist. Baillie was very well known during her lifetime and, though a woman, intended her plays not for the closet but for the stage.
Background
Baillie was born on 11 September 1762 at Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland, United Kingdom. Joanna Baillie was the youngest of three children; she had had a twin sister, but this child had died unnamed a few hours after her birth. She belonged to an old Scottish family, which claimed among its ancestors Sir William Wallace.
Education
Joanna Baillie had received an excellent education, and began very early to write poetry.
Career
Baillie’s lyric poems often take the form of meditations on nature and youth. She was the author of Poems: Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners (1790), Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821), Dramatic Poetry (1836), and Fugitive Verses (1840), which includes revisions of earlier work in addition to new poems. Baillie edited the anthology A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors (1823). Shortly before her death, her complete works, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie (1851), was published. Baillie has enjoyed renewed attention by scholars who focus on her relationship to Romanticism, politics, and literary theory. The scholar Jennifer Breen provides an introduction to her poetry in The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie (2000).
Over the span of her career, Baillie wrote 27 plays. She earned early acclaim with the publication of the first volume of A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy (1798). Peter Duthie edited this series as Plays on the Passions (2001). Baillie was also the author of Miscellaneous Plays (1804), Family Legend (1810), and Dramas (1836).
The greater part of the poet's life was passed in London or with her sister in Hampstead, England, where she died February 23, 1851.
Religion
Growing up as a Presbyterian minister’s daughter, religion had always been important to Baillie. In 1826 she published The Martyr, a tragedy on religion, intended for reading only; and in 1831 she entered publicly into theological debate with a pamphlet, A view of the general tenour of the New Testament regarding the nature and dignity of Jesus Christ, in which she analysed the doctrines of the Trinitarian Order, Arianism, and Socinianism.