Joanna Baillie was one of the most celebrated poets and dramatists of the Romantic age, so admired that her contemporaries called her ‘the female Shakespeare’ and ranked her second only to the Bard himself. Born near Glasgow into a remarkable family, she was a niece of the great anatomist William Hunter.
A Lanarkshire minister’s daughter
Baillie was born in 1762 at Bothwell, where her father was the parish minister, and later brought up in nearby Hamilton. Her father ended his days as Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, and her mother was a sister of the Glasgow-trained anatomists William and John Hunter. As a girl she attended a Glasgow boarding school, and it was there that a first visit to the theatre fired a love of drama that lasted all her life.
To London
When her uncle William Hunter died in 1783, leaving his London house to her brother Matthew, the family moved south, and Joanna kept house for her brother in the capital. Through her aunt, herself a poet, she entered London’s literary society, and began to write in earnest.
Plays on the Passions
Her great work was Plays on the Passions, published in three volumes from 1798, an original and ambitious design in which each play set out to portray a single great passion of the human heart, from love and hatred to fear and ambition. Published at first anonymously, it set literary London guessing at the author, who was assumed to be a man until it was noticed that the central characters were so often middle-aged women. She revealed herself in 1800.
The toast of the age
Baillie’s tragedy De Monfort was staged at Drury Lane with the greatest actors of the day, and her Scottish play The Family Legend was produced at Edinburgh under the patronage of her friend Sir Walter Scott. Byron sought her advice, Wordsworth admired her, and Beethoven set one of her songs to music. A devout and generous woman, she gave much of her earnings to charity.
A rediscovered genius
Baillie lived for half a century in Hampstead with her sister, neither of them marrying, and died there in 1851, almost ninety years old. Her fame faded after her death, but she is recognised again today as a bold innovator of the stage and one of the finest women writers of her time, a figure in Scotland’s wider literary culture.
Related questions
Who was Joanna Baillie?
A Scottish poet and dramatist of the Romantic age, hugely celebrated in her lifetime and sometimes called ‘the female Shakespeare’.
What is Joanna Baillie famous for?
Her Plays on the Passions, a series of dramas each portraying a single great human passion, and for her poems and Scottish songs.
What was Joanna Baillie’s connection to Glasgow?
She was born at Bothwell near Glasgow; her father was Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, and she was a niece of the anatomist William Hunter.
Where is Joanna Baillie buried?
In Hampstead in London, where she lived for fifty years. A memorial to her was also raised at her birthplace of Bothwell.