Joanna Baillie
Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist who was well known during her lifetime. She was educated at Miss MacDonald's Boarding School in Glasgow and it was in Glasgow that she began to write plays and poems.
Baillie was admired for her literary powers and hosted a brilliant literary society in her cottage at Hampstead. Her intelligence and integrity were allied to a modest demeanour which made her, for many, the epitome of a Christian gentlewoman.
She was shrewd, observant of human nature, and persistent to the point of obstinacy in developing her own views and opinions. Her brand of drama remained essentially unchanged throughout her life, and she took pride in having carried out her major work, the Plays on the Passions, more or less in the form she had originally conceived. Her inventive faculties were remarked upon by "practically everybody whose opinion on a literary matter was worth anything" (Carswell 275), and she was on friendly terms with all the leading women writers of her time.
“Amongst the many trials to which the human mind is subjected, that of holding intercourse, real or imaginary, with the world of spirits: of finding itself alone with a being terrific and awful, whose nature and power are unknown, has been justly considered the most severe.”