Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet who wrote in Scots as well as English, with a particular interest in Scottish ballad and song. She was born in 1762 in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, and came from an intellectual family with links to the philosophical and scientific communities of the time, in particular the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’.

Her father, Rev. James Baillie, was Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, her uncle was William Hunter, anatomist and physician, who founded the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum. Matthew, her brother, was a doctor and anatomist.

Baillie was intelligent, with a stimulating intellectual background, yet excluded from the world of science because of her gender. She was interested in psychology and was a keen observer of human behaviour. Initially she wrote plays in verse. Her drama, written for the theatre (rather than the more conventional female-authored closet drama), was innovative for the time. She also wrote poetry, her first major poem the blank verse ‘A Winter’s Day’.

For most of her life Baillie lived in Hampstead, London, and befriended other well-known writers, including Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott and William Wordsworth, as well as the Edinburgh Review critic Francis Jeffrey.

In 1790, Baillie anonymously published Poems. The subject matter includes Scottish rustic issues: poems written for common people, mostly written in English, rather than Scots. In 1798, again anonymously, she published the first volume of Plays on the Passions, one of which was performed in Drury Lane in April 1800. One day later, Baillie’s authorship was disclosed. She published a second volume of the Plays on the Passions in 1802 in her own name, only to receive a damning review. In 1804 Baillie published Miscellaneous Plays. She also wrote original and adapted songs for an anthology. Her songs were an important part of the Scottish ballad revival, written in a mid-west Scottish dialect. In 1812 her reputation was consolidated with the third volume of Plays on the Passions.

In her later career, Baillie returned more to poetry. Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821), written after another trip to Scotland, is a series of heroic takes on exalted characters such as William Wallace, inspired by Scott’s ballads. The volume earned her ₤1,000. In the same year, the collection Poetic Miscellanies contained some of her poetry.

Her first major collection of poems in her own lifetime, Fugitive Verses (1840), was published to assert her claim to the authorship of poems that had been published elsewhere without her name. Her final published volume of poetry was the privately printed ‘Ahalya Bee. A Poem’.

Towards the end of her life Baillie attempted to reassert her status as a dramatist, bringing out a volume of Miscellaneous Plays in 1836. In 1851 she oversaw the publication of her Complete Works, dying shortly afterwards in February 1851