That find, in October 2004, and subsequent years of painstaking literary detective work have resulted in a book, edited by Dr McLean and containing 270 letters by Joanna Baillie, being published in the United States last month.
In 2004, Dr McLean, who specialises in 19th-century British literature, had been based in Los Angeles, and had flown to Dunedin to be interviewed for a lecturing job in the University of Otago English department.
He gained the job but was initially a "bit worried" about how he would pursue his research in New Zealand, far from the main 19th-century manuscript collections, in Britain and North America.
University library special collections librarian Dr Donald Kerr suggested a visit to the Dunedin Public Library, where Dr McLean discovered the Reed Rare Books Collection, which includes a large holding of 19th-century British letters, among them six letters by Baillie.
It had been "very exciting" to discover those letters.
"I was always interested in manuscripts, but it definitely took my work in a new direction, a direction I've really enjoyed and learned a lot from," Dr McLean said.
Baillie (1762-1851) spent most of her adult life living at Hampstead, near London.
Published by New Jersey-based Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Dr McLean's Further Letters of Joanna Baillie reveal an accomplished female writer who was intelligent, well-read and friendly with many literary figures of her time.
Wordsworth knew and liked her. She was friends with Sir Walter Scott and her work was admired by Lord Byron.
Her uncles, the Hunter brothers, were well-known physicians, and her brother was physician to King George III.
Dr McLean noted that another scholar, Judith Bailey Slagle, had previously edited two volumes of Baillie's letters, thought to be definitive, in 1999.
After finding six previously uncollected letters at the public library, he found another couple at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, and published an article, "Joanna Baillie in New Zealand".
He subsequently found letters by Baillie at Yale University and elsewhere in the US, and in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, and knew he had enough for a book.
