Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters by Joanna Baillie

Having established herself as a dramatist of the passions, Joanna Baillie began to turn her attention, as early as 1814, to writing tales of historical figures in verse with her Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters. The project was inspired and encouraged by her close friend, Sir Walter Scott, whose help Baillie also requested when editing and seeking a publisher for the work. Metrical Legends presents the stories of William Wallace, famed Scottish patriot and warrior, Christopher Columbus, discoverer of the new world, and Lady Griseld Baillie, a seventeenth-century ancestor of the author, followed by four supernatural ballads and two appendices providing scholarly notes. The work is also introduced by a “Preface” in which Baillie explains the genre of “metrical legends” as a kind of combination of truth and fiction, distinct from both “biography” and “romance.” The Metrical Legends’ generic ambiguity, which was largely disparaged by critics, perhaps also reflects the dilemma of the woman writer, whose participation in more “masculine” discourses is both aided, and restricted, by her feminine role in society.