Helen Maria Williams
-
Standard Name: Williams, Helen Maria
Birth Name: Helen Maria Williams
HMW
wrote, during the Romantic or revolutionary period, as a woman with a mission, eager to see change for the better in the political, international world. She was a radical and egalitarian in gender relations too, although she believed that femininity comprised especial sensibility. Despite her two novels (one original and one translated), she is best known for her earlier poetry and her later political commentary on events in France, cast in the form of published letters.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Friends, Associates | Charlotte Smith | CS
met Helen Maria Williams
during her brief visit to revolutionary France. She provided an introduction to Williams for William Wordsworth
(who had in fact met or perhaps merely seen her already) before he too... |
Friends, Associates | Mary Wollstonecraft | In Paris MW
met several of her radical friends from London, like Tom Paine
, as well as Helen Maria Williams
and her lover John Hurford Stone
. She also met French revolutionaries like Manon Roland |
Friends, Associates | Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan | On her first visit to Paris, she met Germaine de Staël
, and formed lasting friendships with the marquise de Villette
(Voltaire
's adopted daughter) and with Elizabeth Patterson
(an American heiress, the abandoned... |
Friends, Associates | Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis | SFG
was visited during the Revolution by Helen Maria Williams
(who mentioned her works with respect in print). After her final return to France the flocks of visiting Britons who continued to seek her out... |
Friends, Associates | Amelia Opie | She had already begun to move in fashionable circles, and became friendly with Lady Caroline Lamb
, Lady Cork
, and painters James Northcote
and Sir Joshua Reynolds
. Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. Adeline Mowbray, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. i - xxix. xxxvii |
Friends, Associates | Anne Plumptre | Their friends included Eliza Fenwick
, Helen Maria Williams
, Susannah Taylor
, Mary Hays
, Amelia Opie
, Thomas Holcroft
, John Thelwall
, and other radicals. AP
supported Thelwall's local electioneering, and Ann Jebb |
Friends, Associates | Joanna Baillie | Over the course of her long life JB
made dozens of well-loved friends, many of them either professional writers like herself or else writing amateurs. They included Lucy Aikin
, Mary Berry
, Eliza Fletcher |
Friends, Associates | Mary Scott | MS
was probably a friend from an early age of the dissenting hymn-writer Anne Steele
, who lived not very far away and who was a generation older. They spent much time together in 1773... |
Friends, Associates | Anna Letitia Barbauld | The literary society of ALB
's time was, as biographer Betsy Rodgers notes, small and intimate. Rodgers, Betsy. Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family. Methuen, 1958. 80 |
Friends, Associates | Anna Seward | AS
, visiting London, spent a lot of time with Helen Maria Williams
and her lively social circle. Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931. 144 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Helen Craik | This appeared in four volumes from the Minerva Press
. Its title seems to be the root source of scholarly confusion of HC
with Catherine Cuthbertson
. HC
was clearly familiar with Helen Maria Williams |
Intertextuality and Influence | Elizabeth Moody | She has a sharp eye for gender issues, including those surrounding domestic work. The Housewife's Prayer is addressed to Economy, a name which might be loosely translated as balancing the budget, and ends with the... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Judith Sargent Murray | She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Mary Hays | Among the book's contents are poems and fiction (including dream visions and an Oriental tale. Titles like Cleora, or the Misery Attending Unsuitable Connections and Josepha, or pernicious Effects of early Indulgence foreground Hays's didactic... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Felicia Hemans | Scenes and Hymns of Life includes Prisoners' Evening Service, which imagines the last days of two prisoners awaiting execution during the French Revolution, and affectingly described by Helen Maria Williams
. Duquette, Natasha Aleksiuk. Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Approach to Biblical Interpretation. Pickwick Publications, 2016. 167n3 |
Timeline
1788
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
published his popular sentimentalnovelPaul et Virginie, a two-generation story involving friendship between two single mothers living in a kind of exile in the idyllic, colonial, tropical Ile de France (now...
April 1789
Late 1790
William Holland
published a print of Burke
running the gauntlet of enemies with whips: women as well as men.
June 1793
An enterprising printer and freemason, John Wharlton Bunney
, put out the first number of The Free-Mason's Magazine, or General and Complete Library.
13 July 1793