September 11, 1762

Joanna Baillie  [September 11, 1762 to February 23, 1851 ] was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1762, into a serious and religious family. She was educated in a girls' boarding school. Baillie moved to London in 1783, when her brother inherited the school of anatomy and museum founded earlier by their uncle, William Hunter. Although only five of her plays were produced during her lifetime, Joanna Baillie's 22 plays on the passions were published between 1798 and 1812, supposedly initiated a revival of the drama during the romantic period. Baillie's home in Hampstead, which she shared with her mother and unmarried sister, attracted the most famous writers in England, including Coleridge, Byron, Southey, Landor, and her staunchest advocate, Sir Walter Scott.

Thus her Google blurb.  Her significance has recently been recovered and emphasized. We quote:

Literary history has commonly recognized Wordsworth's preface of 1800 as the first text of English Romantic criticism, but Wordsworth was hardly alone, in the last years of the eighteenth century, in making the attempt to confront the political and cultural crisis of Europe in the 1790s with claims for new, transformative kinds of cultural production. Three years before the appearance of the preface, William Godwin (1757-1836) and Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) had each attempted to rethink the progressive political ideas and rhetorics of the radical Enlightenment within the complicating genres of narrative and dramatic representation. Baillie, a Scottish playwright and poet, appealed in her "Introductory Discourse" to Plays on the Passions(1798) to an analytic, revisionist mode of tragedy that would reconstruct the tragic, "tyrannical passions" from the little, unremembered gestures of everyday life. A rare example of female literary theory in this period, Baillie's "Discourse" was an ideological critique of tragedy's claim to represent a universal human nature, which she countered by tracing the human passions through their genealogy from domestic life to the torrential, officially "tragic" visitations in which (to put it more simply than Baillie does) angry educated men flog and humiliate women, children, and finally one another, as surrogates for themselves. By displacing tragedy from the realm of the state to the domestic spheres of civil society, Baillie also tried to make the latter, gender-defined arena a basis for criticizing the public world, where, in traditional tragedy, the "tragic passions" had been made to appear transhistorical rather than specifically masculine and contextually linked to the larger "tyranny" of England's ownancien régime. In this way, Baillie's theory of tragedy was less an attempt to privatize and domesticate formerly public and political controversy than an effort to rethink the mode of dramatic representation as a discourse capable of making explicit the political restaging of private life.(from Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism)

Baillie not only shifted the historical significance of tragedy onto a domestic arena, but she

in her writing burnished the traditional joys of domesticity, and gave them the glory of poetic treatment. Here is a partial quote from "The Kitten." Baillie describes the aftermath of a kitten's playful games.

......
But, stopped the while thy wanton play,

Applauses, too, thy feats repay:

For then beneath some urchin's hand,

With modest pride thou.takest thy stand,

While many a stroke of fondness glides

Along thy back and tabby sides.

Dilated swells thy glossy fur,

And loudly sings thy busy purr,

As, timing well the equal sound,

Thy clutching feet bepat the ground, ......

Joanna Baillie may have gotten carried away a bit, but she makes it work.  She captures wonderfully the kitten as part of the emotional economy of a household scene.