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…
“From that strong sympathy which most creatures, but the human above all, feel for others of their kind, nothing has become so much an object of man's curiosity as man himself.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Scottish Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Longing
Lady Grizel Baillie, born Grizel Hume on 25 December 1665 and dead on 6 December 1746, occupies an unusual and compelling place in Scottish cultural memory. She is remembered at once as a courageous child of the Covenanter crisis, an exile, a devoted wife and mother, an exacting manager of a great household, the keeper of extraordinary domestic accounts, and the probable author of songs that became part of Scotland’s…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Scottish Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
