SOURCE: "Joanna Baillie's Count Basil and De Monfort: The Unveiling of Gender Issues," in Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie, University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1994, pp. 125–62.

In the following essay, Purinton places Baillie within the context of other women writers of her time and examines the overlap of political and gender issues in Count Basil and De Monfort.

Many of the feminist polemics in the 1790s expose a desire to unveil the fictions that have held women in bondage. "Custom," "habit," and "prejudice" are frequently shown to have enslaved women; oppression of women was thus known to take mental forms as well as economic and physical forms. In the "Introductory Discourse" to her Series of Plays (1798), Baillie emphasizes the mental forms inherent in her work: "The Drama improves us by the knowledge...