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Joanna Baillie
Joanna Baillie (11 September 1762 – 23 February 1851) was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions (three volumes, 1798–1812) and Fugitive Verses (1840). Her work shows an interest in moral philosophy and the Gothic. She was critically acclaimed in her lifetime, and while living in Hampstead, associated with contemporary writers such as Anna Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, and Walter Scott. She died at the age of 88.
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Prentice Hall Literature - Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes - The British Tradition
The BBC Television Shakespeare is a series of British television adaptations of the plays of William Shakespeare, created by Cedric Messina and broadcast by BBC Television. Transmitted in the UK from 3 December 1978 to 27 April 1985, the series spanned seven seasons and thirty-seven episodes. Development began in 1975 when Messina saw that the grounds of Glamis Castle would make a perfect location for an adaptation of Shakespeare's As You Like It for the Play of the Month series. Upon returning to London, however, he had come to envision an entire series devoted exclusively to the dramatic works of Shakespeare. When he encountered a less than enthusiastic response from the BBC's departmental heads, Messina bypassed the usual channels and took his idea directly to the top of the BBC hierarchy, who greenlighted the show.
Further Letters of Joanna Baillie
Scottish playwright and poet Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) is a key literary figure of the British Romantic-era. Scholars have argued for her importance as a forceful and original playwright, a major poet of Scottish songs and ballads, and a passionate writer on aesthetic and theological issues. In recent years her writings have returned to print, her plays have been performed in North America and the United Kingdom, and she has been the subject of several monographs and a biography. For this edition of Further Letters, Dr. Thomas McLean of the University of Otago, New Zealand, has located, transcribed, and annotated some two hundred and thirty new letters from collections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. He has supplemented these manuscript letters with thirty-seven letters previously printed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources but now presumed lost. This new work extends Judith Bailey Slagle’s two-volume Collected Letters (1999), providing new information regarding Baillie’s relationship with her contemporaries, her publishers, and the London theater world. But it also stands alone as a five-decade epistolary overview of Baillie and her times. The earliest letter dates from 1800, not long after Baillie had announced her authorship of the first volume of Plays on the Passions; the last dates only a few weeks before her death in 1851. Baillie’s circle of friends was impressive and included many well-known writers, artists, theologians, scientists, and surgeons. This new edition includes significant letters written to major literary figures like Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans, and Anna Jameson. A series of letters to the actors George and Sarah Bartley give new insights into Baillie’s relationship with the London theatre. Letters to contemporary Scottish writers, including Anne Bannerman, Susan Ferrier, Anne Grant, and Hector Macneill extend our knowledge of Baillie’s relationships with literary Scotland. Baillie’s associations with American writers, and especially those of the New England Unitarian community, are extended here in new letters to Nathaniel Parker Willis, Charles Sumner, Catherine Sedgwick, and Joseph Tuckerman, among others. Letters to leading publishers and close friends give new information about the composition of several of Baillie’s plays, and further evidence of the challenges faced by nineteenth-century women writers. Baillie comments on significant Romantic-era works including Southey’s “Cataract of Lodore,” Lord Byron’s Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Hemans’s Records of Woman, and Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and she presents memorable descriptions of Sarah Siddons, William Wordsworth, Thomas Campbell, and George Crabbe. Taken together, Baillie’s correspondence offers a remarkable five-decade portrait of an artist engaged with the most significant literary, religious, and political issues of her day. Those interested in Scottish literature, British theater, or nineteenth-century women writers will find these wide-ranging letters informative and fascinating.