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’. The author of the ‘Life’ that prefaces her Complete Works of 1851 tells us that ‘[s]he lived in retirement from the first hour to the last’ (Baillie, v). Neither her Scottish dialect nor her English poems normally stray outside the parameters of the domestic and the devotional. However, I want here to explore three poems in which the female figures move outside the British domestic circle. In order to place these poems in the context of their cultural terrain, I will examine a number of other discourses which speak to the ideology of femi- ninity, notably reviews of Baillie's poetry, conduct literature, and Frederick Rowton's 1848 anthology of women poets (in which Baillie has a prominent place). These texts share a number of discursive features which help to show how Joanna Baillie negotiates the boundaries of the space allotted to femininity in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Feminist critics in recent years have been careful to analyse gender differences in conjunction with other socio-cultural differences, such as race, religion, class, sexual preference. I want to invoke at the outset Baillie's nationality, her Scottishness, for this would seem the most obvious ‘other’ difference for the feminist critic to analyse along with that of gender. The signposts to ‘double marginalization’ are securely in place. The poems to look at on this route would be the dialect poems and the poetic representations of rural Scotland, both of which often have a thematic focus on sexual politics. These poems would certainly repay further attention, not least for the factoring in of class that any analysis would have to undertake, for the dialect poems remain writing about the people from a position of class superiority. We are aware of the separation between Baillie's voice and her material, in much the same way that we notice the gap between William Wordsworth and his idiot boys and mad mothers.