SOURCE: "The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Question of Joanna Baillie," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 17–20.

In the following essay, Zall provides an overview of Baillie's literary career and explores the drawbacks of Baillie's high reputation.

Wordsworth pictured Joanna Baillie as the very model of "an English gentlewoman,"¹ but she was in fact Scots born and bred, descended from Wallace himself on her father's side. Born in 1762, she spent her first twenty-one years in Scotland developing an accent that remained a part of her charm until her death in 1851. In her English years, devoted to writing plays aimed at reforming middle class morals, it was not her nationality that impeded her message so much as her being a gentlewoman unfamiliar with her medium, one whose knowledge of plays came from the page rather than the stage. And yet such accomplished professionals as...