[In the following essay, Brewer analyzes the relationship between Baillie and Lord Byron, discussing Byron's admiration for Baillie even when he dismissed other female writers; her influence on his plays, particularly his presentation of male characters; and her harsh judgments of his literary efforts and personal life.]

Although Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) and Lord Byron both spent their childhoods in Scotland and later achieved fame as writers, they seem to have had little else in common. While Byron was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Baillie was largely self-educated, and Byron's famous wanderings contrast sharply with Baillie's quiet life in her home in Hampstead. When Byron wrote dramas he protested vehemently (almost too vehemently) that they were destined for the closet, but Baillie composed her numerous plays expressly for the stage. And perhaps their most significant difference has to do with their moral principles: Byron, although not without ethics, could sometimes write (and even act) like a nihilist, whereas Baillie, a devout Christian, hoped that her dramas would provide moral enlightenment. But despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they had little in common, Baillie and Byron made a strong impression on each other. To Baillie, Byron was initially a steadfast friend who tried to get her tragedy De Monfort produced on Drury Lane; soon after he became a domestic monster who broke the heart of Baillie's dear friend, Annabella Milbanke. Byron was both fascinated and bewildered by Baillie's accomplishments as a dramatist, especially her ability to write tragedies, since he and his contemporaries believed that women, because of their innate delicacy and lack of worldly experience, were incapable of mastering this genre.¹ To Byron, only a woman with a powerful masculine imagination and knowledge of the world (a woman akin to Catherine the Great or Semiramis) could have written Baillie's plays, which deal with human passions and pathologies, as in the corrosive hatred of Baillie's De Monfort and the Napoleonic ambitions of her Ethwald. Although critics have paid it little attention, the Byron-Baillie relationship is important because Byron's response to Baillie helps us understand his attitudes towards the roles of gender and power in female literary production, and Baillie's plays on the passions had a profound influence on Byron's dramas.²

Although Joanna Baillie's works are seldom discussed today, in Byron's time she was considered one of England's great playwrights—Sir Walter Scott wrote, in fact, that she was “certainly the best dramatic writer whom Britain has produced since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger.”³ Her Series of Plays, in which it is attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind (3 vols., 1798-1812) were widely admired by her contemporaries, and, as a published (rather than performed) playwright, she had few rivals. In her dramas she was especially interested in moral and psychological investigation, and in the so-called plays on the passions she set out to write a “series of plays … expressly descriptive of the different passions.”⁴ Each passion was to be the subject of a tragedy and a comedy; for example, in her 1798 volume of plays, Count Basil (a tragedy) and The Tryal (a comedy) both treat the passion of love. Although her plays proved unsuccessful on the stage (her adherents attributed these failures to a lack of popular taste rather than any shortcomings in the works themselves), Baillie was clearly an innovator, and many of those who were sickened by the excesses of the Romantic stage read her works with enthusiasm. Among those who hoped to see her plays produced was Lord Byron who, in 1815, was a member of the Drury Lane Theatre sub-committee of management.

Like many of Baillie's contemporary readers, Byron thought that De Monfort (1798) was her masterpiece, and in 1815 he wrote to the novelist Charles Robert Maturin of his desire to have De Monfort produced at the Drury Lane theatre: “I have been vainly—since my connection with [Drury Lane]—endeavouring to obtain a trial of the revival of ‘De Monfort.’”⁵ To Lady Byron he wrote on 14 September 1821 that De Monfort was to be revived: “If you see Joanna Baillie—tell her that Kean is going to at last act De Monfort—which I urged him to a hundred times in 1815” (BLJ viii, 210). After the failure of this production of De Monfort, Byron had, however, the following reaction: “I once thought of getting Joanna Baillie's ‘De Monfort’ revived; but the winding-up was faulty. She was herself aware of this, and wrote the last act over again; and yet, after all, it failed. She must have been dreadfully annoyed … There are fine things in all the Plays on the Passions: an idea in ‘De Monfort’ struck me particularly; one of the characters said that he knew the footsteps of another.”⁶ Baillie had not only changed the ending of De Monfort to have De Monfort die on stage, she had also heeded Byron's earlier advice, mentioned in her letter to Scott dated 22 June 1815, to “give some stronger reason for De Monforts hatred.”⁷ As Carhart notes, in the second version “De Monfort's hatred of Rezenvelt was strengthened by the addition of a new motive; Rezenvelt was made the victor not only in their school-boy rivalry, but also in a contest for the love of a woman.”⁸ But since the play failed despite these changes, Baillie may have had reason to doubt the wisdom of Byron's earlier advice. And after the Kean production of De Monfort failed on stage, Byron seems to have lost interest in supporting its continued revival, although he continued to believe that “there are fine things in all the Plays on the Passions.”

Byron's unswerving admiration for Baillie is somewhat uncharacteristic, given his general distaste for literary women and their compositions. For example, he attacked the works of such writers as Felicia Hemans and Mrs. Wilmot for their lack of verisimilitude: in his view, Felicia Hemans's Modern Greece, a Poem was objectionable because it was “written by some one who has never been [to Greece]” and in The Skeptic Hemans was “quite wrong” to assert that many skeptics find religion on their deathbed (BLJ v, 262; vii, 113). In contrast, Byron's praise of Baillie was often quite extravagant: “Nothing would do me more honour than the acquaintance of that Lady—who does not possess a more enthusiastic admirer than myself—she is our only dramatist since Otway & Southerne” (BLJ iii, 109). Even though Baillie's life, spent mostly in her home at Hampstead, did not afford her any direct experience of the passions she depicted in her plays, Byron seemed convinced that she, unlike other women writers, could present life realistically. After describing how Mrs. Wilmot's tragedy Ian was damned by an unappreciative Regency audience, Byron wrote to Thomas Moore that “Women (saving Joanna Baillie) cannot write tragedy; they have not seen enough nor felt enough of life for it. I think Semiramis or Catherine II. might have written (could they have been unqueened) a rare play” (BLJ iv, 290).⁹

It is perhaps significant that Byron attributes play-writing abilities to Semiramis and Catherine II—these two women are presented in his Sardanapalus and Don Juan, respectively, as powerful viragos. In Sardanapalus the warrior-queen Semiramis is said to have been slain by her son for having committed incest with him (iv, i. 158),¹⁰ and Catherine, described in Don Juan as “bold and bloody” (ix, 554), is both militarily and sexually aggressive. Byron seems to be suggesting that a successful woman playwright would have to behave in a (traditionally) masculine way, to dominate and possibly even emasculate the men who surround her. In his satire The Blues: A Literary Eclogue, Byron has Inkel warn his friend Tracy against Miss Lilac, whose “heart's in the inkstand [and whose] hand [is] on the pen” (“Ecologue First,” 85)—literary women (or bluestockings) aspire to the phallic pen, and their male counterparts feel threatened by this ambition.¹¹ There is some irony, of course, in the fact that Byron implicitly links Baillie, described by Wordsworth as “a model of an English gentlewoman,”¹² with women like Semiramis and Catherine the Great, but it may be that he saw her as a sort of literary aggressor—certainly her success as a published playwright was much greater than most, if not all, of her literary rivals. For example, without intending to, she discouraged Sir Walter Scott's dramatic efforts. Scott wrote to George Ellis in 1801 that his The House of Aspen paled in comparison to Baillie's plays: “At one time I certainly thought, with my friends, that it might have ranked well enough by the side of the Castle Spectre, Bluebeard, and the other drum and trumpet exhibitions of the day; but the Plays on the Passions have put me entirely out of conceit with my Germanized brat.”¹³ In Don Juan Byron compares the struggle for poetic pre-eminence to boxing “in the fisty ring” (xi, 434) and achieving the position of “The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme” (xi, 440), and it is probable that he would have considered Baillie, “our only dramatist since Otway & Southerne,” “The grand Napoleon” of the dramatic world.

Moreover, Byron's admiration for Baillie's tragedies may have been at least partially fueled by his sense of the theatrical inadequacy of his own dramas. In the Preface to his tragedy Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1821), Byron declared both his own stage fright and his respect for the “dramatic power” of Joanna Baillie.

I cannot conceive any man of irritable feeling putting himself at the mercies of an audience … Were I capable of writing a play which could be deemed stageworthy, success would give me no pleasure, and failure great pain. It is for this reason that even during the time of being one of the committee of one of the theatres, I never made the attempt, and never will. But surely there is dramatic power somewhere, where Joanna Baillie, and Milman, and John Wilson exist. The “City of the Plague” and the “Fall of Jerusalem” are full of the best “material” for tragedy that has been seen since Horace Walpole, except passages of Ethwald and De Monfort.

(iv, 305)

It is important to note that Byron praises Baillie's De Monfort and Ethwald, Parts I and II (1802), a ten-act tragedy on the passion of ambition, immediately after demonstrating his unwillingness ever to subject his own drama to the vicissitudes of performance. This recalls his 14 September 1821 letter to Lady Byron in which Byron first announces that Kean is to play the part of De Monfort and then denies that Marino Faliero is destined for the stage: “They want me to alter ‘the Doge’ for Kean—which I have refused … the Stage is not my object” (BLJ viii, 210). Byron's refusal to sanction productions of his plays contrasts sharply with Baillie's unwavering determination to see her plays acted, even after repeated failures. As Carhart points out in her description of the stage-history of Baillie's dramas, seven of her plays were performed: “Between 1800 and 1826 the leading theatres of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States produced one or more of them.”¹⁴ In her attitude toward the stage, the reserved, self-educated gentlewoman of Hampstead proved infinitely more confident and persevering than the flamboyant and internationally famous lord.

Byron's wonderment over Baillie's ability to master the traditionally masculine genre of tragedy is also expressed in a letter of 2 April 1817: “When Voltaire was asked why no woman has ever written even a tolerable tragedy? ‘Ah (said the Patriarch) the composition of a tragedy requires testicles’.—If this be true Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does—I suppose she borrows them” (BLJ v, 203). To him Baillie had become a strangely androgynous figure, borrowing testicles and comparable to such man-eating women as Semiramis and Catherine the Great. He regarded women who wrote successfully as both threatening (as literary competitors) and somehow masculine. The novelist Maria Edgeworth evidently intimidated him, at least in the early years of his literary career; writing half-jokingly to Lady Davy in 1813, he claimed he “fear[ed] nobody but Miss Edgeworth” (BLJ iii, 44). On the other hand, he seems to have believed that women who were not in his view successful writers had failed to develop masculine qualities. Thus Byron referred to Hemans as “Mrs. Hewoman[s],” suggesting that her “masculine” surname (containing “he” and “man”) is a misnomer, since she does not possess the masculine traits necessary for literary genius (BLJ vii, 158). Byron also insisted on Hemans's femininity in another letter, in which he calls her a “feminine He-Man” (BLJ vii, 183). Such a woman, he wrote Murray, should “knit blue stockings instead of wearing them” (BLJ vii, 182).

Given Baillie's impeccable credentials as a gentlewoman, it must be concluded that Byron discovered her “masculinity” in her works, perhaps in her willingness to explore the often violent passions of her male characters. The authors of the lady's conduct books of the period would certainly have considered obsessional passion an “unladylike” subject, and, in her tragedy Ethwald, Baillie takes on the equally unfeminine themes of ambition and power politics. As Mary Poovey has shown, the Lady's Magazine, an influential woman's journal from 1770-1830, avoided military and political discussion in its presentation of the unfolding events of the French Revolution, whereas the Gentleman's Magazine was frank in its presentation of “Foreign Intelligence”—the implication being that women should remain ignorant of political events and their causes, issues of concern only to men.¹⁵ In Ethwald, however, Baillie charts the progress of a man who stops at nothing in his quest for power and whose paranoia leads him to destroy everyone who is close to him. As Ethwald explains to a henchman, his thirst for power is unquenchable.

Know that the lofty point which oft appears,
To him who stands beneath, the mountain's top,
Is to the daring climber who hath reach'd it
Only a breathing place, from whence he sees
Its real summit, bright and heav'n-illum'd,
Towering majestic, grand, above him far,
As is the lofty spot on which he stands
To the dull plain below.

(part ii, ii.iii)¹⁶

Baillie's exploration of all-consuming ambition in Ethwald has resemblances to Byron's assessment of Napoleon's career in Canto III of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in which he also uses the metaphor of mountain summits.

          He who ascends to mountain-tops, shall find
          The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;
          He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
          Must look down on the hate of those below.
          Though high above the sun of glory glow,
          And far beneath the earth and ocean spread,
          Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow
          Contending tempests on his naked head,
And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.

(iii.397-405)

Ethwald's military career, like Napoleon's, causes widespread carnage and suffering and ends in his own friendless isolation—Baillie's ambition to present this kind of character sets her apart from many of her female contemporaries, who were expected to be more concerned with social propriety than with political and military struggles. Moreover, in his self-tormenting isolation, Ethwald prefigures such Byronic heroes as Lara and Manfred. One can compare, for example, Ethwald's exclamation to his brother, “My heart no kindred holds with human thing” (part ii, iii.iii), with Manfred's expressions of alienation: “My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men, / Nor look'd up on the earth with human eyes” (ii.ii.51-52). Since in her presentation of masculine passions in such works as Ethwald and De Monfort Baillie was taking on a subject matter entirely outside the realm of women's magazines and conduct books, it is hardly surprising that Byron considered her a “masculine” writer.

Byron was not, of course, unique in his belief that Baillie's literary achievement was masculine in nature; before Baillie revealed her authorship of the Plays on the Passions, both the New Monthly Magazine and the Critical Review assumed that the anonymously published dramas had been written by a man.¹⁷ Later, the Quarterly Review described “the incredulity, with which the first rumour that these vigorous and original compositions came from a female hand, was received.”¹⁸ Moreover, in 1828 Scott summed up Baillie's achievement by saying that she “beats the male race of authors out of the pitt in describing the higher passions that are more proper to their sex than hers.”¹⁹ Unlike her contemporaries, however, Baillie never recognized a masculine monopoly over tragedy writing, and, since she believed that men and women exhibited similar passions and behaviors, she was confident in her ability to create characters of both sexes. In her “Introductory Discourse,” in fact, she argued there was no essential difference between male and female characters: “I believe there is no man that ever lived, who has behaved in a certain manner, on a certain occasion, who has not had amongst women some corresponding spirit, who on the like occasion, and every way similarly circumstanced, would have behaved in the like manner” (p. 36). While Byron saw Baillie as the exception to the rule that women could not write tragedies, Baillie never recognized such a rule and absolutely refused to follow the example of many contemporary women authors (such as her dear friend Maria Edgeworth) and write a novel, even though women novelists were becoming successful in the literary marketplace.

Given Byron's respect for her literary achievements, it is not surprising that Baillie's literary principles (as expressed in her “Introductory Discourse” to the 1798 plays) and her Plays on the Passions had an important influence on Byron's dramatic work, especially on Manfred and Marino Faliero. In his introduction to the Garland reprints of Baillie's works, Donald H. Reiman outlines Byron's debt to Baillie:

Byron's … tragedies, beginning with Marino Faliero, owe much—as Byron's letters suggest he knew—to Baillie's example. Each uses simple fiction and a unified action to focus attention on the moral and—above all—the psychological situation. The important dramatic action really takes place within the mind of the protagonist, and its external manifestations are primarily debates between the protagonist and a series of supporting characters representing aspects of his divided self. … [Byron's] dramatic practice finally confirms his admiration of her tragedies.²⁰

Although Baillie's dramas did not, in my view, inspire Byron's determination to return to the “unities” (the ten-act Ethwald, for example, clearly violates them), he shared with Baillie an interest in what Alexander Pope calls master, or ruling, passions. In fact, Byron quoted from Pope's An Essay on Man ii when describing his own character to Annabella Milbanke: “I am sure that of my own character I know nothing—nor could I if my existence were at stake tell what my ‘ruling passion’ is—it takes it's colour I believe from the circumstances in which I am placed—there are few which at one period or other of my life have not affected me—but I could not fix on one which like ‘Aaron's serpent swallowed all the rest’” (BLJ iv, 221-22). If Byron's own ruling passions are determined by circumstances, the master passions he and Baillie depict in their works are fixed: the Loredano of Byron's The Two Foscari is, from first to last, “A very Ovid in the art of hating” (v.i.136), and, in Baillie's passion play on hatred, De Monfort's all-consuming detestation of Rezenvelt only ends after he has murdered his enemy.

Although she did not invent the concept of the ruling passion, Baillie was the first writer to use this idea as the basis of a series of dramas. In her “Introductory Discourse” she argues that tragedies serve “to unveil to us the human mind under the dominion of those strong and fixed passions, which, seemingly unprovoked by outward circumstances, will from small beginnings brood within the breast, till all the better dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature are borne down before them” (pp. 30-31). Thus Count Basil presents Basil's obsessive and unrequited love for Victoria, a passion that grows (despite Victoria's lack of interest) until Basil is consumed by it, and De Monfort explores De Monfort's virulent hatred of Rezenvelt, which stems from, but is not explained by, their boyhood rivalry. Similarly, Byron's Manfred portrays Manfred's desperate need to be reconciled with his dead sister, Astarte, and Marino Faliero focuses on Faliero's thirst for an “absorbing, sweeping, whole revenge” (iii.ii.420) on those who failed to punish the man who offended him. As another character observes, Faliero's “fury doth exceed the provocation” (i.ii.136). Baillie's view that obsessional passions are “seemingly unprovoked by outward circumstances” is echoed in Byron's explication of his mystery play Cain, which focuses on Cain's pride and “internal irritation”: “Cain is a proud man—if Lucifer promised him kingdoms &c.—it would elate him—the object of the demon is to depress him still further in his own estimation than he was before—by showing him infinite things—& his own abasement—till he falls into the frame of mind that leads to the Catastrophe—from mere internal irritation—not premeditation or envy—of Abel—” (BLJ ix, 53-54). These psychodramas center on main characters who are obsessive in their passions, introspective, and given to long, emotional soliloquies.

In a reaction against the bombastic theatrical productions of their day, both Baillie and Byron favored simplicity in their dramatic works. Thus Baillie proposed to write tragedies “of simpler construction, less embellished with poetical decorations, less constrained by that lofty seriousness which has so generally been considered as necessary for the support of tragick dignity” (“Introductory Discourse,” p. 41), and Byron, who strongly believed in preserving the “unities,” asserted that Marino Faliero “is simple and severe.”²¹ As Joseph W. Donohue argues, comparisons between their works can be extremely instructive: “The reader's comparison of De Monfort and Manfred will go far toward illuminating the unexplained sickness of soul which drives Byron's melancholy hero to attempt suicide by hurling himself from a precipice in the Alps.”²² Although none of their works was well-designed for the stage, Baillie and Byron succeeded in creating a new kind of psychodrama which prefigures, in many ways, the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.

While I have focused my discussion to this point on Baillie's influence on Byron's presentation of male characters, it should be noted that some contemporary reviewers were struck by the insightful way in which the two writers presented their female characters. For example, the British Critic compared Zuleika, the heroine of The Bride of Abydos, with Bertha, a character in Ethwald: “An interview … ensues between Zuleika and her brother, which reminds us strongly of a scene in the Ethwald of Miss Baillie.—The playful fondness of Zuleika bears a strong resemblance to the same interesting feature in the character of Bertha, act 1. sc. 2. We are induced to mark the similitude, as the manners of both the females are foreign to the general description of poetical heroines.”²³ In The Bride of Abydos, Zuleika teases Selim to get his attention; in Ethwald, Bertha mocks Ethwald's seriousness. Rather than remaining silent and subordinate while the male protagonists engage in their somber reflections, these heroines interrupt them, asserting, if momentarily, their right to attention and love. Moreover, in a review of Marino Faliero, The Examiner compares Angiolina with De Monfort's faithful sister Jane: “Lord Byron has admirably contrasted and illustrated the character of the Doge by that of his wife Angiolina—an exquisite conception of female dignity and loveliness, in the spirit of the Jane De Monfort of Miss Bailey [sic].”²⁴ Here again Baillie influenced Byron to create a female character who did not fit the usual poetical stereotypes. As Mary Berry wrote in 1799, “no man could or would draw such noble and dignified representations of the female mind as Countess Albini and Jane de Monfort. They often make us clever, captivating, heroic, but never rationally superior.”²⁵ In Marino Faliero, however, Byron proved Berry wrong by depicting, in Angiolina, a “rationally superior” heroine.

In fact, in the cases of Myrrha, the heroine of Byron's Sardanapalus, and Valeria, the heroine of Baillie's Constantine Paleologus, gender roles are effectively subverted. Myrrha's decision to burn with Sardanapalus in a funeral pyre is seen as strange by the soldier Pania:

PANIA.
Let me but fire the pile, and share it with you.
MYRRHA.
That duty's mine.
PANIA.
                                                                                                    A woman's!
MYRRHA.
                                                                                                                             'Tis the soldier's
Part to die for his sovereign, and why not
The woman's with her lover?
PANIA.
                                                                                                                             'Tis most strange!

(v.i.370-73)

Similarly, Valeria's dignity after the defeat and death of her husband is seen as inappropriately masculine by one of Mahomet's henchmen: “It does indeed a wondrous mixture seem / Of woman's loveliness with manly state; / And yet, methinks, I feel as though it were / Strange, and perplexing, and unsuitable. / 'Tis not in nature” (v.iii. p. 477).²⁶ Baillie would seem both to have challenged Byron's belief that women could not write tragedies, and to have inspired him to depict women who act in surprising and sometimes “masculine” ways.

Baillie's opinion of Byron, like Byron's response to her, was partially influenced by sexual stereotypes—whereas Byron reacted positively to the “masculinity” of Baillie's works, Baillie came to detest Byron because of his shortcomings as a husband and father, his failure, in other words, to function responsibly in these masculine roles. Her judgment of Byron's poetry was, moreover, influenced by her conviction that literary characters should be presented in a lifelike way and her Wordsworthian belief that “those works which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks, will ever be the most popular” (“Introductory Discourse,” p. 20).²⁷ Thus her response to The Corsair (1814), expressed in an 8 February 1814 letter to Walter Scott, makes special note of Byron's unrealistic presentation of the main character: “The Corsair appears to us an untrue, inconsistent, outree character; and that nicety of his about the killing of Sayd asleep, under his circumstances & with his principles appears absurd.”²⁸ Despite the phenomenal popularity of The Corsair, Baillie held to her principle, as set forth in “Introductory Discourse,” that in reading poetry “We expect to find [the characters] creatures like ourselves; and if they are untrue to nature, we feel that we are imposed upon; as though the poet had introduced to us for brethren, creatures of a different race, beings of another world” (p. 25).

That she adhered strongly to these principles is demonstrated by the fact that she expressed her negative judgments of The Corsair during a time in which she was beginning to have some positive feelings regarding Byron, who was courting her friend, Annabella Milbanke: “I am somewhat interested for Ld B. for I have lately learnt a great many things concerning him—things that have given me a very good impression of him and have made me look forward to his becoming a worthy & retrieved man.”²⁹ Perhaps, she speculates in the same letter, The Corsair was not Byron at his best: “I cannot help thinking that this same Corsair has been lately manufactured out of some cast-off Tragedy that he has written when he was under twenty”; if one considers the poem as a hastily adapted juvenile production one would of course expect to find in The Corsair many shortcomings, including “fewer good passages than in his former long poems” and a “versification” which is often “laboured” and “very bad.”³⁰ It is significant that Baillie saw The Corsair as a remnant of “some cast-off Tragedy,” since it shows that she was capable of projecting her own dramatic ambitions onto a contemporary who had not at that point written a play. It should be noted, however, that Baillie did show an appreciation for at least two passages of The Corsair, “where Conrad hears the storm & the sea roaring so near him when he is in his dungeon, and … at the end when the corpse of Medora is described,”³¹ even though she judged the poem as a whole to be a failure.

Predictably, Baillie's 26 February 1816 letter to Scott, following the break-up of Byron's marriage, was full of shocked outrage: “Your kind & manly heart will be grieved when I tell you, from authority that cannot be doubted, that he has used her brutally, and that no excuse can be pleaded in his behalf but insanity.”³² Since Baillie believed her friend Lady Byron to be “an Angel,” she could only conclude that any man capable of treating her brutally must be either mad or completely tyrannical; as she wrote to Scott in 1817, “nothing would satisfy [Byron] but the grovling devotedness of a Gulnair [sic].”³³ And according to Baillie, Byron failed as a father as well as a husband: “when [his] child was born [he] seemed delighted with it as a child is with a new toy, but very soon it ceased to be an object of any interest.”³⁴ Byron had suddenly shown himself to be an unnatural husband and father who had, moreover, the temerity to demand (and ultimately receive) a large inheritance from Lady Byron's mother. It seems safe to say that Baillie's literary and personal judgments of Byron were never again unbiased.

As one might expect, Baillie's other responses to Byron's works were largely negative, although here and there she allowed herself a positive comment. Baillie's critique of Manfred (1817) is typical.

Is it not a most extraordinary production? The principal (I should say only) character is just such a dark blasted Being as one might expect him to [have] delineated, but the homely meaness of his incantations & spirit songs among[s]t the lofty Alps w[h]ere nature is so majestic & sublime is what one would not have expected. Surely his head is going just now, and it would be a relief to the minds of his best friends to hear that he is mad. There are striking lines here & there, however, as there always are even in the worst of his poems; the last scene between Manfred & the Abbot of St. Maurice is very good; and that is a beautiful passage where he describes the Coleseum at Rome by moonlight.³⁵

It seems odd that Baillie did not recognize Manfred as, in part, a literary descendant of her De Monfort, and the spirit songs that she criticizes are not unlike the songs of the Mystics in Ethwald. One suspects that Baillie's criticism of Manfred as the production of a madman stemmed from her belief that only insanity could be expected from Byron after his cruelty to Lady Byron. By the time Baillie wrote to Scott about Byron's Childe Harold, Canto iv (1818), however, her sense of outrage was tempered by a kind of amused contempt: “He dismisses his hero as quietly as may be; I was in hopes that the Devil would have run off with him like Dr Faustus or at least that he would have gratified us with some horrific uncertainty regarding it to have created some excitement & employment for conjecture, but I only guess that the Child grew very fat & preferred his easy chair to any further travelling or adventure—,” her conviction that Byron was insane evidently having given way to the belief that he was simply “dull & obscure.”³⁶ Perhaps, like Jane Austen, Baillie had decided that the best way to respond to Byron was to dismiss him. In an 1814 letter Austen had dealt with The Corsair in the following way: “I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.”³⁷

A later attack on Byron was, however, neither humorous nor dismissive. After praising Scott's virtue and purity in a poem written to commemorate Scott's death, Baillie contrasted him with his satanic friend, in whose verse

                                                                                perverse skill pourtrays
Distorted, blighting passions; and displays,
Wild, maniac, selfish fiends to be admired,
As heroes with sublimest ardour fired.
Such are, to what [Scott's] faithful pen hath traced,
With all the shades of varied nature graced,
Like grim cartoons, for Flemish looms prepared,
To Titian's or Murillo's forms compared.(38)

Thus Baillie's antagonism towards Byron even survived the poet's tragic death in Greece. To her Byron's works were “grim cartoons” full of the posturings of Byronic heroes, untrue to nature and morally bankrupt. How much of her revulsion is due to her perception of Lady Byron's sufferings and how much of it can be attributed to her evaluation of the literary merits of Byron's poetry will, perhaps, never be determined.

As we have seen, the Baillie-Byron relationship had an important non-literary dimension—for different reasons, each felt threatened by the other. Baillie objected to Byron and the Byronic hero at least partly because of the way in which Byron had treated Lady Byron. To her the Byronic hero came to represent masculine cruelty and domination—Byron, she theorized, would only be satisfied with a devoted slave, with a woman like Gulnare of The Corsair, who murders for her beloved. Byron, on the other hand, felt a great deal of anxiety regarding Baillie's prowess as a dramatist, implicitly comparing her with such emasculating figures as Semiramis and Catherine the Great, and suggesting that in order to write her tragedies she had “borrowed” masculinity. Although Byron was able to benefit from his reading of Baillie's plays on the passions, Baillie's strongly-held moral principles would not allow her to read Byron (at least after his separation from Lady Byron) with an impartial eye. Her wrong-headed protagonists, carried away by their monomanias, are yet seen as essentially good. Someone like Byron, who had proved himself a thorough domestic miscreant, could only inspire revulsion in her. As she wrote in the “Introductory Discourse,” “A decidedly wicked character can never be interesting” and might even “injure [a drama's] moral effect” (p. 65). After Baillie concluded that Byron and his outlaw heroes were pernicious influences she could scarcely restrain her contempt for them, despite Byron's continued efforts to get De Monfort performed and his selfless actions in Greece. It is perhaps fortunate that Byron remained ignorant of Baillie's animosity and that her effect on him remained, therefore, positive and inspirational. In fact, during a period in which the British theater had become virtually moribund, Baillie came to represent, to Byron and to Scott, the possibility of its renewal. And although she is seldom read today, in Byron's time Baillie was considered by many as a vital force in a valiant, if failed, attempt to reinvigorate the Romantic stage.

Notes

1. In an October 1829 review of Felicia Hemans's Records of Women and The Forest Sanctuary, Francis Jeffrey declared women capable neither of depicting “the fierce and sullen passions of men—nor their coarser vices—nor even scenes of actual business or contention—nor the mixed motives, and strong and faulty characters, by which affairs of moment are usually conducted on the great theatre of the world.” (Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 4 vols. [London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844], iii, 280).

2. To my knowledge, no extended discussion of the Byron-Baillie association exists, although some critics have briefly mentioned their literary relationship. See, for example, Caroline Franklin, Byron's Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 168-72; Donald H. Reiman, “Introduction,” Miscellaneous Plays, by Joanna Baillie (New York: Garland, 1977), pp. vi-vii; and Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 81. For a recent critical assessment of Baillie's best-known drama, see Daniel P. Watkins, “Class, Gender, and Social Motion in Joanna Baillie's De Monfort,” The Wordsworth Circle, 22.2 (Spring 1992), 109-17.

3. To Miss Smith, 4 March 1808, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott: 1787-1832, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932), ii, 29-30.

4. Joanna Baillie, “Introductory Discourse,” A Series of Plays, 1798 (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1990), p. 71; all references to Baillie's “Introductory Discourse,” Count Basil, and De Monfort are taken from this facsimile reprint of the 1798 edition; citations of the “Introductory Discourse” will appear hereafter parenthetically in the text.

5. 21 December 1815, Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975-1982), iv, 336-37. All citations to this edition appear hereafter in the text as BLJ.

6. Medwin's “Conversations of Lord Byron,” ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 95. The passage referred to is in De Monfort iii.1, in which De Monfort exclaims: “'Tis Rezenvelt: I heard his well-known foot! / From the first stair-case, mounting step by step” (p. 354 in 1798 edition).

7. See C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” The Malahat Review, 12 (October 1969), 18-42 (22).

8. Margaret S. Carhart, The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie (1923; Hamden: Archon Books, 1970), p. 124.

9. This letter was written to Thomas Moore, 23 April 1815. Earlier, Mrs. Wilmot's spangled dress had inspired Byron's lyric, “She walks in beauty like the night” (1814).

10. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Byron's works are taken from Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-1993), hereafter cited in the text.

11. See Sonia Hofkosh, “The Writer's Ravishment: Women and the Romantic Author—The Example of Byron,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 13-114 (p. 106), for a discussion of Byron's attitudes towards bluestockings, who, “When they read and write, … upset domestic and literary hierarchies.” In a note to The Blues, Jerome McGann claims that Inkel represents Byron, “Tracy generally recalls Moore,” and Miss Lilac is a surrogate for Annabella Milbanke (vi, 665). Also see Peter J. Manning, Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 145-59.

12. Thomas Sadler, ed., Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 2 vols. (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869), i, 248.

13. To George Ellis, 7 [8] December 1801, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, i, 124.

14. Margaret S. Carhart, The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie, p. 109.

15. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 16-18.

16. Joanna Baillie, The Dramatic and Poetical Works, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), p. 176. All citations of Ethwald and Constantine Paleologus (hereafter in the text) are taken from this edition.

17. Margaret S. Carhart, The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie, p. 14.

18. Quoted in Margaret S. Carhart, The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie, p. 17.

19. To John Richardson, 6 December 1828, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, xi, 58-59.

20. Donald H. Reiman, ed., Miscellaneous Plays, pp. vi-vii.

21. To John Murray, 16 February 1821, BLJ viii, 78.

22. Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age, p. 81.

23. In Donald H. Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1972), part B, i, 242.

24. In Donald H. Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed, part B, iii, 1010.

25. Journal and Correspondence of Miss Berry, ii, 88; reprinted in Margaret S. Carhart, The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie, p. 15.

26. I am indebted here to Caroline Franklin's brief discussion of Baillie's and Byron's female characters in Byron's Heroines, pp. 168-72. In my view, there is also a connection between Baillie's Basil and Byron's Sardanapalus; both plays deal with the conflict between a man's need for love and his duty as a leader.

27. In his Introduction to the Woodstock reprint, Jonathan Wordsworth compares this passage with similar sentiments expressed in Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800). See also William D. Brewer, “The Prefaces of Joanna Baillie and William Wordsworth,” The Friend: Comment on Romanticism, 1.2-3 (October 1991-April 1992), 34-47.

28. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” 19.

29. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” 20.

30. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” 20.

31. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” 19-20.

32. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” 31. According to Lambertson, the “authority” referred to in the letter was probably Baillie's brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, who was asked to make a judgment regarding Byron's mental state. See also Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 211, 214.

33. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” 32; “Speaking of Byron ii,” The Malahat Review 13 (January 1970), 24-46 (39).

34. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron i,” 32.

35. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron ii,” 36.

36. C. L. Lambertson, ed., “Speaking of Byron ii,” 42-43.

37. To Cassandra Austen, 5 March 1814, Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 379.

38. Joanna Baillie, “Lines on the Death of Sir Walter Scott,” The Dramatic and Poetical Works, p. 793.