Librivox volunteers bring you seven readings of The Kitten by Joanna Baillee. This is the fortnightly poetry project for October 26, 2014.

Considered by her contemporaries a playwright “second only to Shakespeare,” Joanna Baillie was one of the most critically acclaimed writers of the Romantic Era. The Plays on the Passions, first published in 1798, stands as her undeniable magnum opus: a multivolume series of tragedies and comedies exploring the overruling passions of the mind. Orra: A Tragedy in Five Acts, which comes from that series' third volume, is Joanna Baillie’s haunting meditation on fear and madness. It is gothic melodrama par excellence...

The Dream is Joanna Baillie’s gothic, proto-Lynchian meditation on fear, guilt, and the prophetic power of dreams. In the cloistered confines of a Swiss monastery, a small group of monks share the same prophetic dream: a forlorn specter reaches out to them with a mysterious—and potentially life-threatening—ultimatum. The dream comes every night, and yet its true import remains hazy and unknown. But when these dreams lead them to a buried corpse, the monastery soon tumbles down a blood-spattered path of vengeance, betrayal, and unbridled terror...