Joanna Baillie

557 Words2 Pages

Not beginning her official education until around age ten, both the days Baillie spent playing outside and her days in classes helped create her love to write. As a young girl, she spent most of her time playing outside, beginning her life-long love of nature and walking amongst it. This portrays yet another characteristic of the Romantic worldview, the love of nature. As her first teacher, her father focused on teaching her the Bible and good ethics. When she went to boarding school at age ten, she studied all other subjects. While she could compose many stories at a young age, Baillie could not read until age eleven, gaining the love to read from her sister Agnes. She created stories and plays for her classmates to act out, which she directed. At her father’s death in 1778, she left the boarding school as an intelligent, self-motivated and well-rounded young woman. Just a few years later, she began her writing career, collecting all her knowledge and using it to create her beautiful works. While her family and education created her character and knowledge, her knowledge of the Bible and good ethics created her worldview.
Even as a small child, Joanna Baillie’s parents taught her from a biblical point of view and from this came her faith and her love of theology throughout her life. Because her father taught her so much theology in her education before she went off to boarding school, her extensive knowledge caused it always to hold great value to her. All her works contain a religious tone, where the characters pray to God often. Although Baillie possessed a strong faith for most of her life, before the end of her writing career, she wrote a pamphlet discussing the Bible and several controversies regarding the nature of Chr...

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...e the next era came to life. Although Joanna Baillie often did not have many connections or great interests in the surrounding world, her audience and friends served as the main connection between her works and the world.

Bibliography
Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie, London: Forgotten Books, 2012.
Carney, Sean. “The Passion of Joanna Baillie: Playwright as Martyr.” Theatre Journal 52, no. 2 (May 2000), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v052/52.2carney.html (accessed January 28, 2014).
Feldman, Paula R., ed. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Haefner, Joel, and Carol Shiner Wilson, eds. Re-visioning Romanticism. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Grun, Bernard. The Timetables of History. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

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