SOURCE: Gilroy, Amanda. “From Here to Alterity: The Geography of Femininity in the Poetry of Joanna Baillie.” In A History of Scottish Women's Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, pp. 143-57. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Gilroy offers close readings of three poems by Baillie set outside her usual Scottish domestic milieu in order to show how the poet explores the limits imposed on women in life and literature.

I

The course of Joanna Baillie's long poetic career, from the late 1790s to the middle of the nineteenth century, corresponds with an increasingly rigid gender ideology, grounded in the doctrine of separate spheres, an ideology by which she, like other women poets, is both constrained and empowered. She inhabits a dominant paradigm of the ‘poetess’, for she stays at home, literally and poetically, writing, as she puts it, about ‘homely subjects’.¹ The author...