ABSTRACT
Though we can count women novelists by the score, the number of women dramatists is extremely limited, and can easily be told off on the fingers. In the last century, all literary young ladies tried their ’prentice hands at a tragedy. One of these ambitious aspirants brought her production to Dr. Johnson, and begged him to look over it. Nearly eighty years afterwards, Joanna Baillie made a sensation in the literary world by her “Plays on the Passions.” She worked on a plan of her own; each of the great passions—anger, jealousy, love, envy, hatred, pride—was to be illustrated by a tragedy and a comedy. Mrs. Inchbald, nine years older than Joanna Baillie, made her mark by comedy, not by tragedy.
