SOURCE: Burroughs, Catherine B. “‘Out of the Pale of Social Kindred Cast’: Conflicted Performance Styles in Joanna Baillie's De Monfort.” In Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley, pp. 223-35. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995.

In the following essay, Burroughs discusses Baillie's categorization of her plays as closet drama and considers questions about gender, identity, and repression in her works, particularly in the tragedy De Monfort.

In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote that “it scarcely seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.”¹ Yet more than sixty years later, discussions of Baillie's influence on writers who lived during or beyond the Romantic period are relatively rare.² The author of twenty-six plays,³ pages of poetry, and a number of play prefaces in which she articulated her theory of...