Critical Study
Scottish poet, playwright, and critical theorist Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) commanded the attention of readers and audiences until the end of the nineteenth century, after which she was obscured for most of the twentieth century. She grew up in rural Scotland, the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister; she played outdoors with parish children; and she nurtured a fertile imagination. She was a performer, and she hated the confinement of school and reading—for even as a child she understood that the key to drama lay in performance. Her early associations guaranteed that she would not be pretentious in relationships or about literature, and she would later manifest her populist ideals in her personal life. Her religious education made her charitable, but her critical mind made her later approach to religion both tolerant and unconventional. She was all her life surrounded by intelligent and powerful men, but she did not see herself as subordinate to them. For whatever reason, she shunned marriage and used her female dramatic characters to speak about its confinement; many of her closest female friends also remained unmarried. She loved her brother Matthew dearly, and she loved Walter Scott in much the same way. Though she was a popular poet and playwright during her lifetime, she was never satisfied with her success, for she knew that successful drama resulted in representation. Baillie had the same ambition as did the famous men around her, but as a woman she had to accept the level of success afforded to women like her, Maria Edgeworth, Felicia Hemans, and others—and, clearly, that was not the same level of success enjoyed by Scott and her other male peers. Baillie was also far ahead of her time in critical understanding and ambition, and her intimacy with the scientific community instilled in her a penchant for experiment—in her case directed at new ways of writing poems and plays.
It is impossible that a woman who dramatized the passions as Baillie did could have been as cool and detached as she appeared to some who knew her. But like the actors in many of her plays, Baillie played the role of a dispassionate gentlewoman. Her feminist agenda was to expose through those plays the inequalities between the sexes, especially in personal and professional relationships. Baillie began publishing as a poet, though, and at least one of her close literary friends, William Sotheby, regretted her later focus on drama. Sotheby clearly sought Baillie's critical eye for his own work, and he believed that she excelled as a poet. On 12 December 1804, the publication year of her Miscellaneous Plays, she replied to his criticism as follows:
But why do you say, out upon me for my inflexibility in persevering to attempt acting Plays? A play certainly is more perfect for being fitted for the stage as well as the closet, and why should not I aim with all my strength to make my things as perfect as possible, however short I may fall of the mark? Dont be afraid that I shall injure them as reading plays on this account. It is endeavouring to suit pieces to the temporary circumstances of particular theatres, and not to the stage in general that injure them in this way. One who never expects as long as she lives to see a play of her own acted, and who never intends to offer a play to any of our Theatres under their present management, is not very likely to do her works much harm by keeping the stage in her eye. Dont you therefore find fault with me, or encrease the number of those who are for quietly setting me aside as a closet writer. I will still go on, having my drums & my trumpets, & my striking situations, & my side scenes & my back scenes, & all the rest of it in my mind, whilst I write, notwithstanding all that you can say to the contrary. (Slagle, Letters 179-80)
Baillie's refusal to give up playwriting attests both to her determination and to her courage, but she did not reject her poetical talents either.
Before her overnight success in 1798 with volume one 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, Joanna Baillie had published only a small volume in 1790 entitled POEMS; wherein it is attempted to describe CERTAIN VIEWS OF NATURE and of RUSTIC MANNERS; and also, to point out, in some instances, the different influence which the same circumstances produce on different character (London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul's Church-Yard). By her account, Poems was composed after at least two failed attempts at drama and after she had finished her tragedy Rayner (Slagle, Life 60-61). This first publication apparently did not meet with much critical success, but the poems from the early volume later came to be included in her larger and more successful 1840 publication, Fugitive Verses.
In a recent edition of these early Poems, editor Jonathan Wordsworth acknowledges Baillie’s originality and suggests that it was Wordsworth and Coleridge who might have benefited from her rather than Baillie from them. First in the section of Poems is A Winter Day, an early composition written on Baillie's move to London in 1784 and born of the disparity between that dreary city and the poet's native Scotland in winter, beginning,
The cock, warm roosting 'mid his feather'd mates, / Now lifts his beak and snuffs the morning air, / Stretches his neck and claps his heavy wings, / Gives three hoarse crows, and glad his task is done, / Low chuckling turns himself upon the roost, / Then nestles down again into his place. (DPW 772)
This poem, explains Jonathan Wordsworth, has its roots in Robert Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night ("Introduction"). Similar images of nature from the pen of Baillie's contemporary William Wordsworth would not follow until 1798, and in this first poem about transitions in the seasons, Baillie acknowledges in nature's sublimity its destructive capabilities which limit both mankind and beast. She does not, however, annoy her reader unnecessarily with a stated purpose. Instead, as Jonathan Wordsworth points out, she provides a brief introduction and follows it with poems complete with natural images and no artificiality. She also offers a series of four lovers, with four different temperaments (melancholy, cheer, pride, and sound-heartedness) mid-way through the volume. While these lovers exhibit passions similar to those that would later become a focus of her plays, the poems must have also influenced other poets. For, as Jonathan Wordsworth explains, "It is clear that Baillie's thinking in the Introductory Address was known to Coleridge and Wordsworth as they worked on Lyrical Ballads, and influenced the wording of the Advertisement," though in 1790 the trend toward "naturalness and simplicity" was less visible than it would be in 1798. Further, he asserts,
That Wordsworth did borrow from Baillie, we know. Two to three months before the Prelude "spots of time" were composed, he had based "There was a boy" on a speech in De Monfort. Could he perhaps in 1798-9 have had access to Poems [1790] as well as the Series of plays? It is a curious thought that if he did, he might well not have known that the volumes were by the same writer. Baillie's anonymity was carefully preserved. ("Introduction")
Wordsworth certainly could have read Baillie's works, but by her own account, she did not actually meet him until 1808.
In addition to her nature poems, Baillie's first small volume also contains lovers' laments from varying perspectives, poems about families, and A Story of Other Times as an imitation of Ossian, whose poems she had read as a child. All in all, her poetical language is simple, her images clear, and her meter usually regular; additionally, poems like "A Disappointment" and "A Lamentation" reveal Baillie's Romantic sensibility checked by reality. When these early Poems appeared again in 1840 as a part of Fugitive Verses, Baillie provided a brief history of the contents in her "Preface":
I believe myself warranted in calling the contents of the following pages "Fugitive Verses," for by far the greatest portion has been in some way or other already before the public, though so scattered among various publications and collections, that it would be very difficult now for any one but myself to bring them together. . . . This book then, does not hold out the allurement of novelty. . . . The occasional pieces for the first time offered to the public, have another disadvantage to contend with. Modern Poetry, within these last thirty years, has become so imaginative, impassioned, and sentimental, that more homely subjects, in simple diction, are held in comparatively small estimation. This, however, is a natural progress of art, and the obstacles it may cast in the way of a less gifted, or less aspiring genius, must be submitted to with good grace. . . . Some Scotch expressions, as might naturally be expected, interfered with clearness of meaning and harmony of sound to an English reader, and some of those I have changed; but I have not been willing, unless when it appeared necessary, entirely to remove this national mark. (Preface and Slagle, Life 279)
A second edition of Fugitive Verses would appear in 1842, for the collection was fairly profitable by nineteenth-century standards. Account ledgers from publisher Edward Moxon's business with Baillie indicate that the first edition run of five hundred copies had realized a profit of £137 by November 10 to be divided between author and publisher, so sales were successful though the run was small. The first edition of Fugitive Verses was a beautifully bound volume, small in width but thick in pages, and by November, 447 of the 500 copies had been sold (Royal HB.ix.66-67).
Most of the verses added to Baillie's 1790 Poems had been written long before their emergence in 1840. Along with the works originally appearing in Poems, Fugitive Verses included "Miscellaneous Poetry" and songs and "Verses on Sacred Subjects." Very close to her family and friends, Baillie honored them in many of her miscellaneous poems. Fittingly, she began the new poems with Lines on the Death of Sir Walter Scott (1832), commemorating her closest friend even as she set up an antagonistic contrast between his poetry and that of her one-time associate Lord Byron. Like the death of her brother Matthew in 1823, nine years later the death of Scott clearly took its toll on Baillie's spirit. In a letter to Scott's son-in-law and biographer John Gibson Lockhart, she lamented in October of 1832:
The stroke of death has restored him again to our imagination in all the power & vigour & generous affections of his best days. All the world admired him, and that admiration was accompanied with a love & good will that are rarely joined to such a sentiment. Had not my admiration been so accompanied, I should have been most ungrateful, for a steady friend he was to me on every occasion. Whilst I had some popularity in the world and during the much longer period in which I have had none, he never passed an opportunity of bringing me, by flattering mention or quotation &c. into favourable notice; and when I wanted a literary contribution or service of any kind, who was so ready & so liberal as himself? It was a pleasing & proud observation for me, when one of the proofs given by some of the public critics why he must be the Author of the Waverley Novels, was because there were so many quotations in them from J Baillie. And that critic said well; for who but himself would have honoured me so much. Forgive this talking of myself, for I feel at this moment like the man who on the loss of his Mother called out "who will love me now!" (Slagle, Letters 831-32)
Scott had been Baillie's mentor almost from their first meeting, but she often failed to give herself the credit she deserved for her own talents; for in the short period of time from the emergence of Poems in 1790 to the emergence of volume two of A Series of Plays in 1802, she produced dozens of poems, song lyrics, and no less than eleven five-act plays—all this, significantly, before she had even met Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and other great writers of the period.
Also included in her dedicatory verses to famous long-time friends is Baillie's "Lines on the Death of William Sotheby," "Recollections of a Dear and Steady Friend" (written for Anne Isabella Milbanke, Lady Byron), "To Mrs. Siddons," and "On the Death of a Very Dear Friend" for Justina Milligan. Writer William Sotheby (1757-1833) was one of Baillie's first acquaintances when she moved to Hampstead with her mother and sister in the late 1790s, and she first met Walter Scott at his home in 1806. Baillie and Sotheby had many Hampstead friends in common and shared editorial suggestions and expertise; both also suffered similar problems with representation at Drury Lane Theatre between 1811 and 1816. Her poem written on Sotheby's death praises his rare combination of learning and fancy, while it hails his humility and empathizes with his life's sorrows. Her recognition of Lady Byron (1792-1860), on the other hand, is written for a much younger, living friend. Baillie had met Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1812, but it was Annabella, as she was called by her friends, who first sought out Baillie and who later urged Lord Byron's association with the playwright sometime between 1813 and 1815. After the Byrons' separation in 1816, Baillie continually worried about Annabella’s health and never forgave Lord Byron for abusing her friend. Her "Recollections" trace Lady Byron's life from its state of "virgin grace," through marriage to the "moody lord" Byron and the agonies that ensued, followed by the happiness brought by daughter Ada, and ending in a celebration of Lady Byron's ultimate tranquility and religious devotion. Baillie's "To Mrs. Siddons" imparts a respectful but less familiar tone, for Baillie and actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) were never exceptionally close friends. Despite their differences in temperament, however, Baillie's lines praise Siddons's talent and passion and declare her natural state to be as regal as her stage presence. Finally, Baillie's remembrance of friend Justina Milligan rings of her early Romantic poetry as she describes Milligan's country abode in Gloucestershire and recalls spots of time when Milligan's "buoyant spirits" seemed the result of nature which looked on and rendered a Christian peace long before her death.
In addition to memorial verses for close friends are Baillie's verses written for family members. Her earliest family memorial, "To James B. Baillie, An Infant," was probably written in 1792 at the birth of Dr. Matthew and Sophia Denman Baillie's first child James. Named for Joanna's father, the Rev. James Baillie, the child would live only a year. In his Divinity Professors in the University of Glasgow, H. M. B. Reid credits Joanna Baillie with securing her father's place in history and cites this poem as a glimpse into his character. Her "Lines to Agnes Baillie on Her Birthday" and "Verses Sent to Mrs. Baillie on Her Birthday, 1813" reveal Joanna's dedication to and love for her sister Agnes and her sister-in-law Sophia. While Agnes Baillie (1760-1861) was Joanna's constant companion, Sophia Denman Baillie (1771-1845) became one of her closest friends; and Sophia's two children, Elizabeth Margaret Baillie (later Mrs. Robert Milligan) (1794-1876) and William Hunter Baillie (1797-1894), are constant topics of Baillie's letters. Her "To Sophia J. Baillie, An Infant" and "Two Brothers" are dedicated to William and Henrietta Duff Baillie's first daughter Sophia Joanna (1836-1882) and their following two sons, Matthew John (1837-1866), and William Hunter (1838-1895).
Other miscellaneous verses, much in the style of those written for Poems in 1790, appear in the volume and begin with Baillie's "Epilogue" written for her friend Mary Berry's play Fashionable Friends, presented at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill in 1800. Two of the poet's most personal and playful verses are "Lines to a Parrot" and "The Kitten," the latter written as she watched her sister Agnes stroke her kitten by the fireside one day (Slagle, Letters 249). But Baillie's more socially conscious verses are identified as school rhymes and devotional songs. Her "Devotional Song for a Negro Child" is reminiscent of William Blake's "The Little Black Boy" but lacks its reality. Rather than providing a remedy for racism, Baillie's poem suggests that the child turn his eyes to God. Baillie's faith in the power of prayer, however, seems far more optimistic than Blake's.
Fugitive Verses ends with several of Baillie's songs and "Verses on Sacred Subjects," both groups of poems born of special requests that came at various periods in her life. At the same time Baillie was finishing Miscellaneous Plays in 1804, she was beginning a long correspondence with music publisher and historian George Thomson (1757-1851) and contributing literally dozens of lyrics for his Scottish, Welsh, and Irish song collections (eleven volumes in all, culminated by a royal octavo edition of six volumes in 1822), which appeared over two decades. Since there were no introductory or concluding symphonies to the airs he collected, Thomson decided to supply them himself, calling on composers and poets alike to aid in the project. Some of Baillie's best songs she recorded in Fugitive Verses, including Scottish dialect poems such as "Fy, Let Us A' to the Wedding," "Hooly and Fairly," and "Tam O' the Lin" and many other verses written specifically for Irish and Scottish airs. As she came to the aid of George Thomson for several decades, Baillie also came to the aid of the church. A request she probably felt she could not deny came from Dr. Baird, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, in January 1824:
The Church of Scotland has for many years adopted some Poetical "Translations & Paraphrases" into the Psalmody of its congregation in addition to the "Psalms of David." A general wish is felt here to . . . obtain a new Collection. . . . My object Madam, in now addressing you is to take the liberty of requesting to know from you whether you would be disposed to honour & benefit such an Association by giving it the aid of your very popular & powerful talents. (Slagle, Letters 1135)
Busy with her own work and recovering from the death of her brother Matthew, Baillie graciously agreed and responded that she would be honored to be a part of the psalmody of her native country because she seldom sat "in an English church without regretting that taught & hired singers should ever have had any thing to do with public worship" (Slagle, Letters 1137). Some of these religious psalms are a part of Fugitive Verses, their own section entitled "Verses on Sacred Subjects" and including various hymns and scriptural songs. "Thoughts Taken from the 93rd Psalm" ends the volume.
As a poet Baillie knew her readers, and she knew that the Romantic innovations of the early nineteenth century were giving way to Victorian ideals of the age of chivalry. In some respects, the Romantic sublime was also being displaced by morality and realism, but she welcomed such a transition. Visiting her on the appearance of Fugitive Verses was critic Francis Jeffrey, who wrote, "I found her as fresh, natural, and amiable as ever, and as little like a tragic muse." Two years later he described her as "marvellous in health and spirits, and youthful freshness and simplicity of feeling, and not a bit deaf, blind, or torpid. . . the prettiest, bestdressed, kindest, happiest beauty of fourscore that has been seen since the flood" (qtd. in Lockhart 5:336n). After his harsh review of Baillie's plays in 1812, it seems that Jeffrey tried to reclaim her trust, but it is not apparent that he ever did.
After the success of Baillie's first two volumes of A Series of Plays in 1798 and 1802, followed by Miscellaneous Plays in 1804, she began work on a second edition of Miscellaneous Plays to appear in 1805 and to include her Scottish Highland drama The Family Legend. After Legend's successful Edinburgh production in 1810, the playwright commenced volume three of A Series of Plays and her new Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters. In a letter dated February 1816, just before Baillie's trip to Switzerland with her newly married niece Elizabeth Margaret Baillie and husband Capt. Robert Milligan, Baillie wrote Walter Scott to praise his recently published Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk but concluded that "it would have been better to have given them not as the letters of a fictitious person, altho' the introductory letter is a very good one of its kind" (Slagle, Letters 348). Scott had asked earlier to see her draft of Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters, so he, in turn, suggested that certain alterations be made to her Columbus. In one of two autobiographical documents, Baillie later explained that Scott had been instrumental in her decision to try her hand at such historical verses:
In the great & deserved sensation of admiration excited by the Poems of Walter Scott, a few years later, I had my share, and the generous encouragement I always received from him was certainly of great use in keeping me to my work. The fascination of his heroic Ballads made the drama less interesting for a time and then an idea of Metrical Legends of exalted Characters, in which there should be no mixter [sic] of fiction in the events . . . first came into my head. . . . You know that I have been in Switzerland and have seen objects there which you would naturally expect me to notice but during the short time I was in that sublime region, my mind was occupied with anxious thoughts, and . . . I carried nothing home with me to add to the indwelling treasures of my heart . . . . I did not carry home with me what I might have done under different circumstances. The clouds seen in my youthful days floating across Benlomon[d] . . . as seen from the high lands of Longcalderwood, were my chief store of mountain-Ideas and continued so through life. (Slagle, Letters 13)
It is difficult to know how much or in what way Scott may have reshaped these poems, but Baillie alluded to his revisions to Columbus in a letter from June 1819. He would also ask to see her Legend of Lady Griseld Baillie a few months later:
I have some time ago corrected & altered & copied out fair all my 3 Metrical Legends viz of William Wallace, Lady G. Baillie & Columbus. To this last in the way of reflection or imagery I have added nearly a third, besides altering all that you directly found fault with; for tho' you did not for fear of discouraging me too much, absolutely tell me that the poem was dry & bare, I had gumption enough to guess at your thoughts, and I hope I have profited by your opinion as much as if you had really set it down in black & white. I want to know from you how I should proceed in offering this small volume of poetry to the Booksellers. Unless I get a thousand guineas for it I will not publish at all. I mean to give Mr.Longman the first offer, and should he decline it, as probably he will, I would offer it next to Constable or Murray or any body you would advise me to. (Slagle, Letters 389-90)
Longman, of course, published two editions of the volume in 1821.
Baillie probably did profit from many of Scott's comments, certainly from his experience with publishers, for he suggested how she might negotiate her contract with Longman, and their collaboration was typical for many writers as a significant part of the creative process. Baillie revised Metrical Legends while her sister spent three weeks in Paris during 1819; and by 1821, in the midst of the Baillie sisters' move from their Hampstead home near Red Lion Hill to Holly Bush Hill (now called Bolton House), Joanna was putting the finishing touches on her metrical collection.
Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters includes three historical legends, A Metrical Legend of William Wallace, The Legend of Columbus, and The Legend of Lady Griseld Baillie, along with four shorter pieces entitled "Lord John of the East: A Ballad," "Malcolm's Heir: A Tale of Wonder," "The Elden Tree: An Ancient Ballad," and "The Ghost of Fadon." As Baillie states in the "Preface" to these poetical romances,
I have ventured upon what may be considered, in some degree, as a new attempt, - to give a short descriptive chronicle of those noble beings, whose existence has honoured human nature and benefited mankind. (DPW 705)
Combining fictitious circumstances with both history and biography, Baillie's first memorial would be A Metrical Legend of William Wallace, the hero "of whose name some sensation of pride and of gratitude passes over every Scottish heart" (DPW 707). Somewhat different is her Legend of Christopher Columbus, prompted by his "boldness" as a "discoverer" with the "gentleness and humanity of a Christian" and largely inspired by her reading of Herrera's History of America (DPW 708). Baillie equates these traits with those of a clan chieftain like Wallace, thus endowing Columbus with a similar heroic status and allowing him a place with her two Scottish nationalists, Wallace and Baillie.
Her third memorial would be similar to Wallace in its nationalistic recognition of Lady Griseld [sic] Baillie, a woman virtually unknown to history but exhibiting "a perfection of character which is peculiar to woman" (DPW 709). Lady Grisell Baillie (1665-1746), was the daughter of Sir Patrick Hume of Polworth and Grisell Kerr. According to historians, she reportedly saved her father's life (under suspicion for participating in the Rye House Plot) by hiding him in the family vault near Redbraes Castle; her father's friend Robert Baillie was hanged, drawn and quartered on the same charge in 1685. The family fled to Utrecht, in exile with other Scottish Presbyterians, and Grisell made a secret voyage back to Scotland to rescue her sister and the family's fortune. At the 1688 revolution she and her mother returned to Britain in the company of the Princess of Orange. She married George Baillie, son of the executed Robert, in 1692 and helped manage his and her father's estates. Also a writer, her works include Orpheus Caledonius or a Collection of the Best Scotch Songs set to Music by W. Thomson (1726) and The Household Book of Lady Griselle Baillie (1692-1733) (Todd 28-29).
Baillie's remembrance of heroine Lady Baillie clearly furthered her feminist agenda. But she admitted that she struggled with the problem of how to write this woman's life, having to rely on domestic details sometimes "considered as vulgar and mean" rather than on documented historical fact (DPW 709). As Catherine Burroughs suggests, Baillie's dramatic theories open "ways of appreciating women's contributions to both public and private stages" (115), and the same may be said of Lady Griseld Baillie. While Lady Griseld is a non-dramatic work, Baillie still captures in the legend the spirit and strength of a Scottish heroine.
After the emergence of Metrical Legends, Baillie wrote to Mary Berry in October of 1821 that "I am told they are pretty well received in Scotland, but I dont think they are much liked in this southern part of the kingdom" (Slagle, Letters 170). She was to some extent correct according to various reviews that followed. But a fragment of a critique by Mrs. Anne Grant (1755-1838) of Laggan, dated by Edinburgh University Special Collections as 1822, alludes to The Legend of Lady Griseld Baillie as follows:
The most illustrious person to whom Miss Baillie has assigned a place in her temple of well earned fame is a female whom we are proud to claim as our countrywoman. . . . In the pleasing task of recording congenial [?] virtues Miss Baillie seems quite at home . . . inspired by her subject. (Gen 1995/3 1)
A critic for the Monthly Review of September 1821 also found Lady Griseld Baillie the most palatable legend, but his overall review was far from gracious, beginning with A Metrical Legend of Wallace:
Miss Baillie has made a full acknowledgement of minor obligations to Sir Walter Scott in her preface: but too much of thought and feeling, as well as of style and manner, is surely borrowed . . . from 'Lay of the last Minstrel.' . . . It is a higher and nobler instrument of poetical music which Joanna Baillie is qualified to strike. She seems to us condescending from the due station of her genius, when in company with Sir Walter Scott she walks down into the regions of octosyllabic verse, and quits her early manner of treating heroic subjects in heroic strains. (Art. XII: 72-81)
Postulating that "much indeed remains in 'Wallace' of most unexceptionable merit" and quoting particularly pleasing passages from The Legend of Christopher Columbus, the critic finally asserts,
The most pleasing tale in the book is the legend of 'Lady Griseld Baillie'. . . . Although a domestic subject, in the general character of the story, it is rendered susceptible of the most elegant poetry in many parts of it by the exquisite tact of the writer; and, where she fails in verse, she remains an interesting prose-narrator of singular events: but, in our panegyric, we here intend to mingle no slight reprehension, when we call the fair author a prose-narrator of anything which she intends to be verse. . . . Although Mr. [George] Crabbe, and all his degenerate critics, were to vow together on the altar of Nonsense that this is verse, we would not believe them. Mr. Wordsworth's corroborating asseveration would also be cast in without effect.
It seems that while Baillie's old nemesis Francis Jeffrey had censured her for rejecting his design for drama, this critic censured her just as surely for allowing Scott's design to influence her writing.
Never at rest, Baillie, having finished her Metrical Legends project, was almost immediately in the midst of a fresh one, this time an edited collection of new poetry. A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors appeared from Longman in 1823, the excitement of its publication dampened by the death of Dr. Matthew Baillie on September 23 of that year. During the difficult period of her brother’s illness the year before, Baillie had been soliciting manuscript poems for a proposed poetry anthology to be sold by subscription. In 1822, requesting unpublished works from most of her author friends, she intended to edit a volume of poetry for the benefit of a needy friend, Mrs. James Stirling, and to call it A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823). Most of her letters from 1822-23 refer to this edition, which contained poems by Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, the late Anne Home Hunter, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, George Crabbe, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Samuel Rogers, Felicia Hemans, Anna Maria Porter, Anne Grant of Laggan, Baillie, and many others; and it earned well over £2,000 with its subscription. Baillie's letters throughout this task reveal her good business sense, tenacity, critical perception, and tactful editing. She had no compunction about returning inferior poetry for revision, as indicated in her April 1822 letter to astronomer Sir John Herschel:
Many thanks, my dear Sir, for the verses [you] have sent me. They would have been considered as good, composed under the most favourable circumstances, and in a Stage Coach with all that clatters about-scouring rooms & passages, they are wonderful. My Sister & Mrs Elliot are clear for their being inserted in my Collection, and so should 1, but for a hankering after something of your composition written with more deliberation and not in a subject connected with the arts . . . . Writing so well in so short a time and in a Stage Coach, what would you not do in the silence of your own chamber, and reasonable time allowed for it? That savours too much of a learned Wrangler who considers poetry as a mere play thing, undeserving of either time or consideration. Pray think upon this, and let me have something more to my fancy, altho' this is sufficiently so to be considered by me as deserving a place in a better collection of poetry than mine probably will be. (Slagle, Letters 788)
Baillie's playful but candid criticism was well taken, for the famous astronomer must have sat down immediately with pen in hand to appease her; he quickly sent her five revised poems. Three she included in her collection: "the Lark," the Lament," and "the Sailor's departure." When the collection was completed and copies were ready in 1823, Baillie handled their circulation herself and sent instructions to Longman for the physical distribution to subscribers (Slagle, Letters 1160).
The opportunity to engage herself in a work which required only minor creative effort on her part probably gave Baillie the diversion she needed for dealing with Matthew Baillie's death and with the succeeding gloom that invaded the family. At the same time, it both aided her friend and provided the reading public with a sample of some admirable late Romantic poetry, uniting famous poets with unfamiliar ones. This anthology attests to Baillie's lack of literary snobbery, for she consistently read and supported writers in all stations. She gathered the poems for her collection from her friends—from Walter Scott and William Wordsworth to John Richardson and Margaret Holford Hodson. Ultimately, she thanked Scott for his support of the project in July of 1823: "In short I took hold of your strong arm at the very beginning and, leaning upon that, put forth my hand and caught at all the rest of the Poetical Brotherhood likely to do me any good" (Slagle, Letters 419). Her letter continued with praise for individual contributors, including Henry Gally Knight, Catharine Fanshawe, Felicia Hemans, and others. Scott's Mac Duff’s Cross was chief in the volume. When she wrote to Scott again, it would be to relay the devastating news of her brother's death.
In 1832 and the years that followed the death of Sir Walter Scott (1832), Baillie produced two editions of a religious and philosophical work entitled A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ (1831 and 1838), a second edition of A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript (1832), a three-volume work entitled simply Dramas (1836), and Fugitive Verses (1840). She then focused on finalizing her last two publications, Ahalya Baee (1849) and The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie (1851).
Baillie began Ahalya Baee: A Poem, published by Spottiswoods and Shaw for private circulation, at least ten years before its appearance. She mentioned the poem to her friend Mary Montgomery in March 1840 as a "Metrical Legend to keep company, after I am gone, with the Legends I have already publish'd":
How far it may be deemed worthy to do so I know not, for I have not yet shewn it to any body, but I am inclined to think favorably of it my own self. How far my own self is a good critic in this case I may not venture to say. The subject of it is an Eastern Ranie or Queen, the celebrated Ahalya Baee (celebrated in India I mean). (Slagle, Letters 879)
As the inspiration for this new legend, Baillie credited Indian administrator and diplomat Sir John Malcolm, who had been "powerfully charmed by the character of Ahalya Baee" in his travels to India. Like her other legends, Baillie explains in the "Introduction," this poem adds "no fictitious circumstances to the story or characters" and is embellished only by "supposed feeling and description" (DPW 839). Baillie's last heroine is the epitome of strength and compassion. Both a judicious ruler and a devoted mother, Ahalya Baee watches one son die and an adopted son go to war, to return only for the "bier of death." Exhausted by care and fatigue, the "regent Mother" dies at the age of sixty and is praised as follows:
For thirty years — her reign of peace — / The land in blessings did increase / And she was bless'd by every tongue / By stern and gentle, old and young. . . . Yea, even children at their mothers' feet, / Are taught such homely rhyming to repeat: — / "In better days, from Brahma came, / To rule our land, a noble Dame; / Kind was her heart, and bright her fame, / And Ahalya was her honour'd name!" (DPW 847)
Like her Lady Griseld Baillie, Baillie's Ahalya Baee is a combination of authority and domesticity far superior to the warring rulers around her. She represents what may be assessed as the epitome of womanhood for Baillie, but she is ultimately a victim in the patriarchal arena of war and confirms that women's commitment to sustaining life directly contrasts with men's engagement in war and violence. In Baillie's conflict of genders, man prevails in the physical world, but woman prevails in the spiritual—according to this feminist octogenarian, the sublime state.
Baillie followed Ahalya Baee with a final collection of her complete works, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, published in 1851 shortly before her death. This "monster book,” as she called it, was edited mostly for her heirs, but it was also one final move to leave her mark as a woman writer. In her final contract with Longman, dated 13 April 1850, the publisher agreed that "Messrs. Longman and Co. shall publish at their own expense and risk The works of Joanna Baillie in one volume," which indicates that they were hardly afraid of failure at this point in their long years of dealing with the author (Slagle, Life 284). After the 1851 first edition, The Dramatic and Poetical Works appeared in two subsequent editions from Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, one later in 1851 and another in 1853.
In conclusion, Joanna Baillie was a vibrant, intelligent woman confined to a patriarchal world; her life spanned the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Aside from her twenty-seven plays, eight metrical legends, and dozens of poems, her great legacy lies also in hundreds of eloquent letters from which we can formulate a sense of the intellectual society emerging with early Romanticism. She faced a time of social, political, and intellectual change, prompted not only by two major revolutions, but also by major shifts in literary style and focus of the imagination. Baillie was a participant in her era and commented on the issues of her time. As Anne Mellor concludes, through the historical, cultural, and political philosophies implicit in her critical introductions and dramas, Scottish nationalist Joanna Baillie often "positions herself as the unacknowledged legislator of the British Nation" (42). To assume, as early writers have done, that she was unaware of the world outside Hampstead, or that her life was uneventful and her later years ineffective is uninformed and critically naive, for Baillie's later publications and letters reveal a tenacious and ambitious woman who was receiving visits from friends and family, publishing Ahalya Baee: A Poem in 1849, and editing her complete works nearly to the time of her death in 1851 at the age of eighty-eight. However incongruous it may seem, Joanna Baillie prevailed as a student of human nature, as a nationalist, as a creative feminist, and as a conservative and religious theorist.
Works Cited
"Art. XII. Metrical
Legends of exalted Characters." The Monthly Review XCV1 (1821): 72-8
1.
Baillie, Joanna. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie.
London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851. All quotes
from Baillie's
works come from this edition abbreviated herein as DPW.
Baillie, Joanna. "Preface." Fugitive Verses. London: Moxon,
1840.
Burroughs, Catherine B. Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory
of British Romantic Women Writers. Philadelphia, U
of Pennsylvania P, 1997.
Edinburgh University Gen Ms 1995/3 1.
Lockhart, John Gibson. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. 5 vols.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901.
Mellor, Anne K. Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England,
1780-1830. Bloomington and Indianapolis: U of Indiana P, 2000.
Reid, H. M. B. The Divinity Professors in the University of Glasgow. 2
vols. Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson and Company, 1923.
Royal College of Surgeons Ms HB.ix.66-67.
Slagle, Judith Bailey, ed. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. 2
vols. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999.
Slagle, Judith Bailey. Joanna Baillie: A Literary Life. Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002.
Todd, Janet, ed. British Women Writers. New York: Continuum, 1989.
Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. "Introduction." Poems, 1790. Oxford
and New York: Woodstock, 1994.