Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism


Baillie, Joanna (Vol. 151) | Amanda Gilroy and Keith Hanley (essay date 2002)

Amanda Gilroy and Keith Hanley (essay date 2002)

SOURCE: Gilroy, Amanda, and Keith Hanley. “Introduction.” In Joanna Baillie: A Selection of Plays and Poems, edited by Amanda Gilroy and Keith Hanley, pp. ix-xxxvii. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002.

[In the following essay, Gilroy and Hanley analyze Baillie's dramatic career, her ideas about human frailty, and her status as a Romantic writer.]

LIFE

Joanna Baillie was born in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 11th September, 1762, the daughter of James Baillie, a Presbyterian minister, whose family counted William Wallace amongst its ancestors, and Dorothea Hunter, who was descended from an old Ayrshire family. Her mother's sister, Anne, was a noted poet, and her two brothers, William and John Hunter, were the most famous medical men of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 Joanna had a sister, Agnes, born in 1760 and a brother, Matthew, born in...

[The entire page is 13252 words long]

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