3 - Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Dacre

Summary

In 1798, the year after Radcliffe bowed out of the literary scene, a volume was published anonymously with the arresting title A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. The contents did not disappoint. There was an ‘Introductory Discourse’ outlining not only a grandiose scheme for the analysis of each passion in a paired tragedy and comedy, but also a radical theory for regenerating dramatic writing. The three plays themselves were judged to be masterly; particularly the tragedies, De Monfort and Basil, focused respectively on the antithetical passions of hate and love (those posited by the philosopher Malebranche as the root passions). The plots had a simplicity and the language a poetic resonance that had long been missing from British drama.

The volume soon aroused intense interest and speculation. Who was the author? The first reviews, in the New Monthly Magazine and the Critical Review, praised the strength and originality of the writing while assuming that the author was a man. Some thought it might be Walter Scott. Back in Bath, Hester Piozzi recorded that ‘a knot of Literary Characters [including Sarah Siddons] met at Miss [Sophia] Lee's House … deciding – contrary to my own judgment – that a learned man must have been the author; and I, chiefly to put the Company in a good humour, maintained it was a woman. Merely, said I, because the heroines are Dames Passées, and a man has no notion of mentioning a female after she is five and twenty.’ The dramatist Mary Berry had received the book incognito from the author, and had stayed up all night reading it, noting in her diary the following year that ‘The first question on every one's lips is, “Have you read the series of plays?” Every body talks in the raptures I always thought they deserved of the tragedies, and of the introduction as of a new and admirable piece of criticism’. She too was of the opinion that the author was a woman, ‘only because, no man could or would draw such noble and dignified representations of the female mind as Countess Albini and Jane de Monfort. They often make us clever, captivating, heroic, but never rationally superior.’