Author: BAILLIE (Joanna):
Title: Miscellaneous Plays. Second Edition.
Description: London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme..., 1805. 8vo, 212 x 128 mms, pp. xxiii [xxiv blank], 438. UNIFORMLY BOUND WITH: BAILLIE (Joanna): A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the Strong Passion of the Mind: each passion being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy. A New Edition. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown..., 1821. 3 volumes. 8vo, 212 x 128 mms., pp. [iv], 410; xi [xii blank], 478; xxxi [xxxii blank], 314, including half-title in first two volumes. 4 volumes, uniformly bound in near contemporary half calf, marbled boards, red and olive morocco labels; numbering label on volume 2 chipped, very slight wear to tops of spines, but generally a very good and attractive set, with the ownership inscription "Marianne Gates/ March 9th 1836" on the top margin of the title--page of the first volume and similar inscriptions on the title-pages of the other three volumes. Joanna Baillie (1762 - 1851) published her first book, Poems: Wherein it is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners in 1790. Her family moved several times, but when she began living in Colchester in the late 1790s, she returned to her first literary love, the stage and wrote several dramas. She published Plays on the Passions in 1798, and De Monfort was staged at Drury Lane with John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons in the leading roles. Alas, even the star quality of these actors did not make the play a great success, and it closed after eleven performances. Worthy but dull seems to be the apposite cliche for her work, but her ODNB biographer vigorously defends her: "Joanna Baillie's contemporaries placed her above all women poets except Sappho. According to Harriet Martineau she had 'enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and … been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare' (H. Martineau, Autobiography, 1, 1983, 358). But even when Martineau met her, in the 1830s, that fame seemed to belong to a bygone era. There were no revivals of her plays in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; and yet, as psychological studies, her tragedies would seem very suited to the intimacy of television or film. Twentieth-century scholars have recognized her importance as an innovator on the stage and as a dramatic theorist, and revisionary critics and literary historians of the Romantic period concerned to reassess the place of women writers are acknowledging her significance."

Keywords: Drama women literature


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