31 Facts About Joanna Baillie

Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions and Fugitive Verses.

Joanna Baillie was critically acclaimed in her lifetime, and while living in Hampstead, associated with contemporary writers such as Anna Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, and Walter Scott.

Joanna Baillie was the youngest of three children: her twin sister died unnamed as a baby, her surviving sister was Agnes Baillie, who lived to be a centenarian.

Joanna Baillie had her own pony and her interest in stories was demonstrated by plays she created and stories she told.

Joanna Baillie did not learn to read until the age of ten, when she attended Miss McDonald's Glasgow boarding school, ostensibly known for "transforming healthy little hoydens into perfect little ladies".

Joanna Baillie was said to have had 'an epiphany' when she first attended a theatre.

Joanna Baillie's father died in 1778 and their financial position decreased, although Matthew went on to study medicine at Balliol College, Oxford.

Joanna Baillie's aunt, Anne Hunter, was a society hostess and a poet, and through her Baillie was introduced to the bluestockings Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Carter, and Elizabeth Montagu.

Joanna Baillie studied Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire and Shakespeare, and wrote plays and poetry while running their brother's household until he married in 1791.

Joanna Baillie's works were not published until that time, and even then anonymously, after both her father and uncle William had died in 1783.

Joanna Baillie wrote letters to Sir Walter Scott and they would visit and stay with each other; he wrote a prologue to her 1810 production of The Family Legend.

When she reached her seventies, Joanna Baillie experienced a year of ill health, but recovered and returned to writing and correspondence, and included Scottish folk songs in her Fugitive Verses written in her eighties.

Joanna Baillie died in 1851 in Hampstead, almost 90 years old.

Joanna Baillie finally revealed herself as the author in 1800, in the title-page of the third edition.

Joanna Baillie did not seek acclaim for her poems, but simply wrote them for enjoyment.

However, in an 1804 prefatory address in Miscellaneous Plays, Joanna Baillie defended her plays as acting plays.

Joanna Baillie believed that critics had unfairly labelled her work as closet drama, partly because she was a woman and partly because they had failed to read her prefaces with care.

Joanna Baillie pointed to the conventions of the theatre in her time, when lavish spectacle on huge stages was the order of the day.

Joanna Baillie's own plays, with their attention to psychological detail, worked best, she argued, in well-lit small theatres where facial expressions could clearly be seen.

Financially secure herself, Joanna Baillie customarily gave half her earnings from writing to charity, and engaged in many philanthropic activities.

Joanna Baillie declined to send a poem, fearing that was "just the very way to have the whole matter considered by the sober pot-boilers over the whole kingdom as a fanciful and visionary thing," whereas "a plain statement of their miserable lot in prose, accompanied with a simple, reasonable plan for sweeping chimneys without them" was far better strategically.

Where literary matters were concerned, Joanna Baillie had a shrewd understanding of publishing as a trade.

Joanna Baillie took seriously the influence her eminence gave her, and authors down on their luck, women writers, and working-class poets like the shoemaker poet John Struthers applied to her for assistance.

Joanna Baillie wrote letters, drew on all her contacts, and used her knowledge of the literary world to advise or to further a less well-connected writer.

Joanna Baillie befriended the eccentric American writer, critic and activist John Neal, after reading his article "Men and Women" in Blackwood's Magazine in October 1824.

Joanna Baillie in turn admired Baillie's poems and plays and welcomed the attention from the more established literary figure.

In 1806 Joanna Baillie solidified a friendship with Scott and she and her sister would often visit Scotland.

Joanna Baillie attacked the narrow theory, practice and purpose of the plays.

Joanna Baillie offered a new way of looking at drama and poetry.

Joanna Baillie was revered by poets on both sides of the Atlantic; many of her contemporaries placed her above all women poets except Sappho.

One of those Joanna Baillie corresponded with most was Sir Walter Scott.