SOURCE: "Class, Gender, and Social Motion in Joanna Baillie's DeMonfort," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 109–17.

In the following essay, Watkins stresses the historical value of De Monfort's depictions of social conditions and class conflicts.

Recent scholarly work on Romanticism and feminism has begun to bring Joanna Baillie back from the dead in literary history. For instance, as Stuart Curran states, "two years before Wordsworth's celebrated preface, [Joanna Baillie] had published her own seventy-two-page argument for naturalness of language and situation across all the literary genres," and, in her capacity as dramatist, she was often compared to Shakespeare.¹ Despite the efforts of Curran and a few other notable scholars, however, the hard labor of reviving and critically investigating Baillie's literary accomplishment, particularly her dramas, has barely begun. While the reason for this may be attributed to the masculine biases that continue to influence Romantic...