Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions 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.
c. 1825 drawing of Joanna Baillie by Mary Ann Knight
Title page of Joanna Baillie's Miscellaneous Plays (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1804)
Playbill for Joanna Baillie's The Last of the Caesars; or, Constantine Palaeologus at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh, 29 May 1820
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature. A prominent member of the Blue Stockings Society and a "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career that spanned more than half a century.
Barbauld and her brother, John Aikin (shown here in later years), became literary partners.
Joseph Priestley (c. 1763): "Mrs. Barbauld has told me that it was the perusal of some verses of mine that first induced her to write any thing in verse".
Design for the medallion of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (formed 1787), struck by Josiah Wedgwood
Original title page from Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
