Joanna Baillie and the Art of Moral Influence explores the project of moral reform that Baillie
sets out for herself in the Introductory Discourse to her first volume of Plays on the Passions
(1798). It begins by revealing the foundation that Baillie creates for her project as she
combines her own unique theology with eighteenth-century moral philosophy and seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century discourses on the theatre's potential to reform audiences. This book argues
that Baillie uses this eclectic mix to craft a potentially radical social critique in the midst
of a seemingly conservative moral project. Using examples from fifteen of her plays as well as
from her prefaces and her religious tract the book traces Baillie's moral project from its
direct representations in De Monfort and Henriquez through its dangerous complexities in plays
such as Orra and The Trial to its conflict with domestic ideology as an alternative means of
reform in plays such as The Dream Ethwald The Phantom and Witchcraft. This analysis of
Baillie's project reveals how she ultimately overcomes the difficulties inherent in her project
by asking her audiences to take responsibility for their moral reform rather than relying upon
the domestic woman to change society and by asking her audiences to ground their
interpretations in the basic truths of Christianity. Understanding Baillie's moral project and
the discourses that influenced it and then seeing how it is enacted throughout her plays will
allow teachers and scholars to appreciate even more fully the complexities of this British
Romantic playwright.
