SOURCE: Scullion, Adrienne. “Some Women of the Nineteenth-century Scottish Theatre: Joanna Baillie, Frances Wright and Helen MacGregor.” In A History of Scottish Women's Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, pp. 158-78. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Scullion views Baillie as the most important playwright in Scotland in the 1800s and sees her works as having a form peculiar to the nineteenth century.

John Any-Body would have stood higher with the critics than Joanna Baillie.¹

The women of the nineteenth-century Scottish stage are varied, little known and undervalued. Yet it is, of course, the case that women populated all aspects of this vital phase in Scottish theatre history. As actresses, managers and playwrights they were most influential, but they also occupied the stage as singers, dancers, musicians and acrobats, as well as being engaged as historians and critics and they were, of course, consumers...