Joanna Baillie

• Born: September 11, 1762
• Birthplace: Bothwell, Lankashire, Scotland
• Died: February 23, 1851
• Place of death: Hampstead, London, England

Other Literary Forms

Though Joanna Baillie is known primarily for her dramas, her first publication was Poems, which appeared as an anonymous work in 1790. Some of the poems in this volume were reprinted in Baillie’s Fugitive Verses (1840). During her lifetime, Baillie was much admired for her lyrics, many of which appeared in the collections of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh songs brought out periodically by her friend, the music publisher and historian George Thomson. Her poetic narratives included those in the Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821) and Ahalya Baee: A Poem (1849). Baillie’s prose works consisted primarily of literary criticism, though she did publish a book on religious dogma. Shortly before her death, Baillie oversaw the publication of her collected works.

Achievements

Although Joanna Baillie defied literary convention by publishing her plays before they were staged, she did not intend them to be closet dramas. It was a disappointment to her that only seven of them were ever professionally produced. However, all major theaters in England, Scotland, Ireland, or the United States staged a play by Baillie at one time or another; in addition, almost all the important theater actors portrayed one or more of her characters.

Baillie’s popularity could also be measured by the demands for new editions of her works. Critics were not always as enthusiastic about her works as the public seemed to be; however, Baillie always believed that her gender accounted for many of those unfavorable reviews. Baillie counted among her admirers some of the most important writers of her day, including Sir Walter Scott, who became one of her closest friends. Baillie’s achievements won her a signal honor: election as an honorary member of the Whittington Club, a prestigious London society dedicated to the advancement of culture.

Biography

Joanna Baillie was born to Dorothea Hunter Baillie and the Reverend James Baillie on September 11, 1762, in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland. Her twin sister died a few hours later. Joanna had an older sister, Agnes, and an older brother, Matthew. In 1772, Joanna and Agnes were sent to boarding school in Glasgow. Three years later, their father became professor of divinity at Glasgow University. After his brother-in-law’s death in 1778, Dorothea’s brother provided a home for the family at Long Calderwood, Scotland, and took Matthew into his medical school in London. After his uncle’s death, having inherited both the school and his home, Matthew brought his mother and his sisters to London. After Dorothea died in 1806, the two sisters made their permanent home in Hampstead. Neither of them married.

Joanna Baillie had enjoyed reading plays and going to the theater in Glasgow. However, in London, her interest became a passion. Nine months after her arrival, Baillie began to write her first dramatic work. However, it was almost a decade and a half before her first volume of plays was published anonymously, arousing wild speculation as to its authorship. Not until 1800, when a third edition of that volume came out, did the public learn that the author was not an established man of letters or even a well-known woman writer but a modest Scottish spinster. Baillie was now famous.

After her third and final volume of Plays on the Passions appeared in 1812, Baillie turned increasingly to poetry as her primary creative outlet. In 1836, however, she did produce a three-volume set of books containing ten new plays, two of which were eventually staged, though each of them was withdrawn after opening night. This publication marked the end of Baillie’s dramatic career.

In her final years, Baillie worried that her plays would be forgotten. Therefore she was delighted when a London bookseller asked her to oversee a complete edition of her works. The project was completed during the final year of her life. On February 22, 1851, she lapsed into a coma. She died the following day and was buried in the parish churchyard at Hampstead, where she lies next to her sister.

Analysis

In the “Introductory Discourse” to the first volume of her Plays on the Passions, Joanna Baillie explained how “sympathetic curiosity” motivates people to observe others. When a writer uses this natural interest to arouse empathy for the characters he or she has created, the result can be a more compassionate society.

Baillie’s belief that social reform comes from the heart, not from the head, and her fascination with psychological extremes place her clearly in the mainstream of English Romanticism, along with William Wordsworth, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, her emphasis on the destructive power of the passions and her insistence on the need for restraint are obviously neoclassical.

Although Baillie was convinced that drama could play an important part in influencing human behavior, she felt that in her day the theater was failing in its mission. Both the tragedies and the comedies of her time were superficial, she asserted, not because they failed to recognize the primacy of emotion in human nature but because they focused on events rather than on process. Instead of showing a character already in the grips of passion, a dramatist should introduce his hero or heroine much earlier, so that the emotion could be traced from the first hint of disequilibrium to the point when it became an all-consuming force. Thus Baillie’s dramas were meant to serve two purposes: Not only would they bring the audience to see how passions progressed, but they would also illustrate how plays should be written.

De Monfort

Unlike the other two plays in Baillie’s first volume, a tragedy and a comedy both dealing with love, De Monfort is about a passion that is by definition evil. The tragic hero, De Monfort, is obsessed by his hatred for Rezenvelt. At first, it appears that Rezenvelt may indeed be as hypocritically wicked as De Monfort thinks. However, in the third act, Baillie traces De Monfort’s hatred back to its beginning in boyhood rivalries, and from that time on, it becomes increasingly evident that Rezenvelt is not the villain De Monfort believes him to be but a decent man, worthy of the hand of De Monfort’s sister Jane.

Though later critics insist that De Monfort is far from Baillie’s best work, it has been performed on stage more than any of her other plays. When the great nineteenth century actors flung themselves into the resounding speeches Baillie had created for them, audiences insisted that she should rank with the playwright William Shakespeare. However, the play was essentially a psychological work, as the playwright had intended it to be. The dark forest in which De Monfort kills Rezenvelt symbolizes the darkness that has overtaken De Monfort’s mind and soul. Baillie was true to her theory in having her hero die before trial, killed by nothing but his own poisonous hatred.

The Family Legend

The subject of The Family Legend is a feud between rival clans of Scottish Highlanders. The play was written as a result of Baillie’s renewed interest in her Scottish heritage, which had been stimulated by her friendship with Sir Walter Scott. Baillie frequently consulted Scott during the composition of the play, and it was Scott who was responsible for its being accepted by the Edinburgh Theatre Royal, where it opened on January 29, 1810, with a prologue by Scott and an epilogue by another revered Scottish man of letters, Henry Mackenzie. In his letters, Scott describes the production as a triumph. For fourteen consecutive nights, the house was full and the applause deafening. The play later moved to England and to the United States. Of all Baillie’s plays, only De Monfort was performed more often than The Family Legend.

Some critics argue that where stagecraft is concerned, The Family Legend is superior to De Monfort and, indeed, to the other plays in Baillie’s first volume of Plays on the Passions. It may be that initially Baillie let her theories, not her imagination, dictate what her characters said and did; it may be simply that by the time she wrote The Family Legend, Baillie was a more experienced playwright. In any case, the fact that The Family Legend was one of her most effective plays, as well as one of the most moving, must be attributed in part to Baillie’s own feeling for Scotland and the Scottish past.

Orra

The publication of Baillie’s correspondence proved what feminist critics suspected: that one of the author’s primary themes was the subjugation of women in a male-dominated society. Even though Baillie identified “fear” as the subject of Orra, the title character of that play is vulnerable only because she is in the power of men. After she refuses to marry his son, Orra’s guardian turns her over to the villainous Rudigere, who is supposed to frighten her into compliance but in fact has his own designs on her. Although Orra is isolated, subjected to mental torture, and finally reduced to insanity, she never gives in. On the surface, the play is a warning against superstition. However, feminist critics point out that it is a celebration of a woman’s strength and an indictment of the men who believe they have the right to break her.

By venturing into the field of dramatic theory, Baillie had defied the male establishment, which liked to believe women incapable of logical thought. Reexaminations of her plays in the late twentieth century have pointed to the spirit of rebellion in them and the implicit criticism of an unjust society, resulting in her being called by some scholars the most important British woman playwright of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Biliography

Burroughs, Catherine B. Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Burroughs, an actor herself as well as a student of theatrical history, contends that because Baillie’s purpose was to teach audiences compassion for others by expanding their imaginative powers, her plays and her theoretical writings are still relevant. Extensive analyses of the plays and of the prefaces. Includes portrait, voluminous notes, appendix, extensive bibliography, and index.

Burroughs, Catherine B., ed. Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Four of the essays in this volume deal with Baillie’s works. In her introduction, the editor explains why the works of women writers such as Baillie deserve to be re-examined. Bibliography and index.

Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. Yale Studies in English 64. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1923. The standard biography. Includes a chapter on stage history. Bibliography lists reviews by Baillie’s contemporaries.

Carswell, Donald. Scott and His Circle, with Four Portrait Studies. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1930. Carswell’s section on Joanna Baillie continues to be a primary source of biographical information. Incisive and very readable. Illustrated. Bibliography, though dated, may be useful.

Crochunis, Thomas C., ed. Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays. London: Routledge, 2004. Collection of critical essays, including interpretations of Baillie’s work and examinations of the historical context in which she wrote. Includes bibliography and index.

Donkin, Ellen. Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1829. London: Routledge, 1995. Points out how the double standard of the male-dominated literary establishment made it difficult for Baillie and others to gain the acceptance they merited. Illustrated, bibliography, index.

Slagle, Judith Bailey. “Joanna Baillie Through Her Letters.” In The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, edited by Judith Bailey Slagle. 2 vols. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. An excellent biographical sketch of Baillie, including numerous excerpts from the letters, is followed by a chronology. This important scholarly work has an up-to-date bibliography and is thoroughly indexed.

Watkins, Daniel P. A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. Insists that Baillie should be ranked as a major Romantic writer because of her insights into the “radical transformation” taking place in her society. A detailed analysis of De Monfort supports this view. Bibliography and index.