Joanna Baillie: the "female Shakespeare of a later age"?

A three-volume set of plays among largely surgical and medical collections, on the surface, seems out of place. Their presence, however, reminds us that the Hunter and Baillie families also enriched a world beyond medicine.

The author of these plays is Joanna Baillie. She was born in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, on 11 September 1762. She was a niece of the physicians and anatomists William and John Hunter and a sister of the physician and pathologist Matthew Baillie. Joanna did not learn to read until the age of ten, but her interest in stories and plays was apparent from her early childhood. Her first visit to a theatre inspired her so much that she began to write her own plays and poems.

Portrait of Joanna Baillie © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Upon William Hunter’s death in 1783, Matthew was left a house in Windmill Street, London and Hunter’s collection, which went on to become the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow. As a result, Joanna, her sister Agnes, and their widowed mother, Dorothea Hunter, moved to London where they were to look after their brother’s household until his marriage in 1791. This move southwards was transformative for Joanna: her aunt, Anne (Home) Hunter, was a poet and socialite who was able to introduce Joanna to the likes of Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Carter, and Elizabeth Montagu. In later years, it would be Joanna’s influence that ensured the continued publication of her aunt’s poetry in anthologies. During this period, Baillie studied the works of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, and Shakespeare, and continued to pen her own plays and poems, though more earnestly now. Her first work, Poems: Wherein it is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners, was published in 1790. The Baillie women moved house several times: in Colchester, Joanna started working on the aforementioned three-volume set of plays. The trio settled in Hampstead in 1802; Joanna was to live there with her sister for the rest of her life.

The set of plays referred to is Baillie’s Plays on the Passions. The first volume of these plays was published anonymously in 1798. The second volume was published in 1802 in Joanna’s name, and the third and final volume was published in 1812. Once Baillie’s identity became known as the author in 1800, her aunt Anne Hunter was able to introduce her to London literary society.

Baillie’s Plays on the Passions on the shelf in the Research Room.

Our Library has two sets of these plays: an earlier two-volume set published in 1802, and the three-volume set discussed here from 1821. The full title of the 1821 edition conveys its purpose: “A series of plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passion of the mind: each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy”. The plays were ultimately dramatic studies and explorations of human emotion, philosophy, and psychology.

The title page of volume one.

The first volume is made up of the plays Count Basil, The Tryal, and De Monfort. Count Basil is a tragedy on love: the play follows a famous general (Count Basil) who ultimately followed his heart over his head, and this path, in the midst of war, leads Basil to bitter regret. The Tryal examines love from a different angle. This play is a comedy following two women, Agnes, a young, rich heiress and Marianne, her poorer cousin, who switch places. De Monfort is a tragedy on hatred: this play follows the Marquis De Monfort and his hatred of his schoolmate Rezenvelt, culminating in murder. In 1800, a production of De Monfort was put on at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane starring John Kemble and Sarah Siddons. Although the play was staged well and ran for eight nights, it did not do well critically.

The first pages of the play Count Basil.

Nevertheless, the second volume followed in 1802. This comprised The Election, Ethwald, and The Second Marriage. The Election is similar in theme to De Monfort but looks at this “passion” under a different light. This play is a comedy on hatred, focusing on the debt-ridden aristocrat Lord Baltimore and his rival, Freeman, from the newly-established merchant class. In Ethwald and The Second Marriage, Baillie focuses on ambition. Ethwald is a two-part tragedy on the subject, whereas The Second Marriage is a comedy. Baillie believed that these plays - particularly Ethwald - showcased her best writing.

The third volume was published in 1812 and was made up of the plays Orra, The Dream, The Siege, and The Beacon. Although Orra and The Dream are both gothic tragedies and The Siege is a comedy, they all explore the passion of fear. The Beacon, conversely, is a musical drama examining hope.

The first pages of the play The Beacon.

In the preface to the final volume of plays, Baillie makes an interesting disclosure. Baillie writes that “this will probably be the last volume of plays I shall ever publish”. Baillie still wanted to complete her works on the passions, namely by exploring remorse, jealousy, and revenge. Baillie was “strongly of opinion that [she] ought to reserve the remainder of the work in manuscript, if [she] would not run the risk of entirely frustrating [her] original design”. Indeed, Baillie believed that “the present situation of dramatic affairs” worked counter to her creative ambitions: she stated that “the circumstance of these plays having been already published would operate strongly against their being received upon the stage”. Despite this pronouncement, Baillie finally in 1836 published three volumes of Miscellaneous Plays. These included the missing passions on remorse, jealousy and revenge.

Baillie’s other works in this period also served the interests of the Plays on the Passions. The success of the production of Baillie’s The Family Legend in 1810 inspired the revival of De Monfort. However, her plays faced some contemporary criticism: they were perceived as dull or lacking in stagecraft. Baillie ardently defended her plays, arguing against the notion of critics that her plays were closet dramas. Baillie, nevertheless, was highly praised. One of her contemporaries, the social theorist Harriet Martineau, stated that Baillie 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”. Indeed, the American critic and writer John Neal in 1866 crowned Baillie the “female Shakespeare of a later age”. Baillie’s works were translated into Sinhalese and German, and they were performed widely in Britain and the United States.

Despite eliciting such emotion over her plays in the 1800s, Baillie’s works slipped from the limelight. Her plays were not revived in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The play Count Basil is thought to have only been first performed by a Washington DC-based theatre company in 2003. Fortunately, however, Baillie’s works are being rediscovered, not only in feminist and romantic thought, but also more widely, helped in part by a 2018 Google Doodle commemorating her 256^th birthday.

Our set of Baillie’s Plays on the Passions is available to view by appointment in our Research Room. Furthermore, you can read more about Anne Hunter and the Hunter-Baillie family in a previous Library blog post. The Hunterian Museum at the College also holds items belonging to Joanna Baillie. The museum indeed features a recording of some music played on her English guittara.

Further Reading

• Clarke, N. “Baillie, Joanna (1762–1851), playwright and poet”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1062 (cited 22 July 2025).
• The Joanna Baillie Project. https://joannabaillieproject.blogspot.com/ (cited 22 July 2025).

Maria Hunt, Information Assistant