Joanna Baillie: Who is the Scottish poet and playwright descended from William Wallace?

Dramatist behind ambitious Plays on the Passions sequence, admired by Wordsworth, Byron and Scott, celebrated on 256th anniversary

Scottish poet, dramatist and philanthropist Joanna Baillie was born precisely 256 years ago.

Celebrated in the latest Google Doodle, Baillie is best known for her theatrical sequence Plays on the Passions, an incredibly ambitious ten-work project dedicated to “unveiling the human mind under the dominion of those strong and fixed passions” through a series of astute female-led comedies and tragedies.

Joanna, the youngest of three siblings, was born in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, on 11 September 1762, daughter of the Reverend James Baillie, a Presbyterian minister whose family traced its roots back to the legendary Scottish warrior William Wallace, victor over the English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297.

Joanna would later immortalise her ancestor in verse, alongside Christopher Columbus and others, in her Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821).

As a child, Baillie staged theatrical productions with her classmates, a practice she continued at boarding school in Glasgow.

Relocating to Windmill Street in Fitzrovia, London, with her mother in 1784 - where Joanna’s late uncle had left the family a property - she gained access to the literary circle of the English capital, meeting the novelist Fanny Burney and finding the encouragement to write her first poem, “Winter Day”.

She began to make a serious study of drama, reading Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere and Voltaire.

When the family relocated to Colchester in 1791, she conceived the idea for what would become Plays on the Passions and spent the decade writing Basil, The Tryal and De Monfort, which would comprise the first published volume of the work in 1798.

With no name on the title page but a lengthy introductory discourse outlining her intentions, the author’s identity was a subject of no little speculation at the turn of the 19th century.

A lavish Drury Lane production of De Monfort appeared in 1800 starring leading actors of the day Sarah Siddons and John Kemple but was not a success despite an 11-night run. A revival of 1821, starring Edmund Kean, fared a little better.

Joanne Baillie was acknowledged as the author of the second volume of Plays when it arrived in 1802, this instalment comprised of The Election, Ethwald and The Second Marriage. A third, consisting of Orra, The Dream, The Siege and The Beacon, would appear, following some delay, in 1814.

In the interim, she relocated to Hampstead, where she would live the remainder of her life with her sister Agnes following the death of their mother in 1806.

Her play The Family Legend was produced in Edinburgh thanks to the patronage of Sir Walter Scott, with whom she had a long friendship – the pair hosting each other on visits north and south of the border and engaging in a prolific correspondence.

Her final collection of poetry, Fugitive Verses, appeared in 1840, revisiting her earliest compositions of 1790 at the advice of friend and fellow poet Samuel Rogers.

Admired throughout her life for intelligence, wit and eye for human frailty, Joanna Bailey was one of the most respected writers of her period, hailed as the finest female poet since Sappho by everyone from William Wordsworth and Lord Byron to John Stuart Mill to Maria Edgeworth. Her philanthropic work on behalf of the poor was also widely admired.

She died at home in Hampstead on 23 February 1851, aged 88.