Joanna Baillie was born on 11 September 1762 at the manse of Bothwell, near Hamilton in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and died on 23 February 1851 at Hampstead, then a village on the northern edge of London. During her exceptionally long life, she became one of the most admired British writers of the Romantic period: a poet of acute observation, an ambitious theorist of the emotions, a dramatist who sought to renew tragedy…
“Sending a poem is just the very way to have the whole matter considered by the sober pot-boilers over the whole kingdom as a fanciful and visionary thing.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Scottish Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Longing
Mary Ann Lamb was born on 3 December 1764 in London, into a family whose modest respectability, intellectual curiosity, and later misfortunes would shape her entire life. She died on 20 May 1847, having survived nearly a decade beyond her beloved younger brother and lifelong collaborator, Charles Lamb. To many generations she was known principally as “Charles Lamb’s sister,” the anonymous or partially hidden partner…
“You would like to see us, as we often sit, writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan: I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Longing
