“NEITHER fame nor a thousand pounds, therefore, have much effect on this said author’s mind, whoever he or she may be. I say she, because, and 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.’
The opinion that the author was a woman gained ground rapidly, and Ann Radcliffe was generally considered to be the author.* The Scotch tone furnished another clue, and many guessed that Scott himself had written them.* In 1800, however, the series was tacitly acknowledged to be the production of a female writer, and was generally attributed to the pen of Mrs Hunter.* As late as the notices of the stage-production of De Monfort in 1800,* some question existed as to the identity of its author. No doubt remained, however, after the issue of the third edition in 1800, in which the name of Joanna Baillie appeared on the title page.*
Countess Albini is a character in the first of the ‘Plays on the Passions,’ a tragedy on love entitled ‘Basil.’ Jane de Monfort is the sister of the chief character in the third play in the series, a tragedy on hatred entitled ‘De Monfort.’ The other play was a comedy on love called ‘The Trial.’
Ann Radcliffe (née Ward, 1764-1823), a pioneer of Gothic novels best known for ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (1794).
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), the prolific poet and novelist who lived at Abbotsford in Roxburghshire.
Rachel Hunter (?1754-1813), author of several novels including ‘Letitia‘ (1801) and ‘Lady Maclairn,’ the ‘Victim of Villany’ (1806). Her writings, like those of Ann Radcliffe, were much enjoyed and playfully parodied by Jane Austen.
‘De Monfort’ was produced the the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, with opening night on April 29th, 1800. It was the pet project of actor-manager John Philip Kemble (1757-1823), who cast his even more famous sister Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) as Jane Monfort, and took the title role himself. The play ran for only eleven nights, and when Edmund Kean (1787-1833) revived the play in 1821 he did not have much more success. That the plays were good was not in doubt. Some critics suggested that they were for reading, not for acting; in later years, the author insisted that they were suited to the stage, but to small, intimate theatres where facial expression and tone of voice could be picked up by the audience, not to the large and boisterous environment of a fashionable London playhouse.
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) was born in Bothwell in South Lanarkshire, a few miles from Glasgow. Her aunt, Anne Hunter, was a poet and in London introduced Joanna to such fashionable literary figures as Fanny Burney and Elizabeth Montagu. After the death of her father in 1778, Joanna moved with her mother to the Camden home of her brother Matthew, a surgeon; then to Colchester, where she began writing plays and poetry and came to public attention with ‘Plays on the Passions’ (1798), to which further plays were added in later years; and finally in 1802 to Hampstead. Walter Scott championed her dramas; Samuel Rogers assisted in the publication of her best-known collection of poems, ‘Fugitive Verses’ (1840).