Marianne Baillie's knowledge of Spain

Abstract

From a multidisciplinary approach to the studying of Anglo-Hispanic relations in the historical context of the years immediately following the Peninsular War (1807-14) fought between Spain, Portugal and Britain against Napoleonic France, I analyze the degree of (lack of) knowledge that the English poet and traveller Marianne Baillie had about Spain (a country until recently allied with Britain) and about its culture and its literature. The data on Spain that Baillie provides after her forced Portuguese residence in 1821-23 in her popular travel account LISBON IN THE YEARS 1821, 1822 AND 1823 (1824) serves to complement and build the collective mosaic that other contemporaries Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley or Byron, among others, had spread of our country in their poems. To this end, my study of Baillie adds to that already carried out by other specialists of the period regarding the image of Spain during the years of British Romanticism and the Regency.