SOURCE: Henderson, Andrea. “Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baille's ‘Introductory Discourse.’” Publications of the Modern Language Association 121, no. 2 (March 1997): 198-213.

In the following essay, Henderson considers Baille's introduction to her plays as not only a treatise on writing but as an examination of consumerism.

In 1802 a reviewer for the British Critic remarked that “Miss J. Baillie, even if her pen were now to be inactive, which is not likely, would be always celebrated among the brightest luminaries of the present period” (Rev. of Series, 194). Although relatively little known today, Joanna Baillie arguably “exerted the most direct practical and theoretical force on serious drama written in the Romantic period” (Curran 186); indeed, she was hailed in her time as the finest British dramatist since Shakespeare. Emphasizing the importance of her work to an understanding of Romanticism, Stuart Curran notes that in her 1798 “Introductory Discourse,” the preface to her first volume...