WorkJoanna Baillie

Fugitive Verses; Metrical Legends

Fugitive Verses; Metrical Legends, Inferred

InferredMargaret Fuller's account of visiting Joanna Baillie in Hampstead reveals a thoughtful engagement with Baillie's poetry, particularly with a work that tenderly depicted the author's sister, Agnes.

Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist

V. New York

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)1record

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

Preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

1840—

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

p183

analyzed · read

“I went to pay my court to Joanna Baillie.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.

Inferred Margaret Fuller's account of visiting Joanna Baillie in Hampstead reveals a thoughtful engagement with Baillie's poetry, particularly with a work that tenderly depicted the author's sister, Agnes.

Fuller discerns in the poem a "happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and tender pathos," and judges it to possess "absolute truth of outline." While the specific poem remains unidentified, Fuller's insightful commentary suggests she was familiar with Baillie's later collections, such as Fugitive Verses (1840) or Metrical Legends (1821), which often explored themes of familial affection.