Helen Maria Williams

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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.
Stippple engraving of Helen Maria Williams by Dean and Munday, published in 1816, from unknown portrait, Her hair is part in loose curls and part gathered to the top of her head. She is wearing a white, low-necked gown, a black mantle, and a double pearl necklace on which hangs a Maltese cross The portrait is oval, and has her name written underneath.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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 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.
80
Writers all knew each other and kept in touch; those who did not live in London visited frequently...
Textual Features Anna Letitia Barbauld
She strikes a newly bold, almost an insurrectionary note here, calling upon revolutionary France, indeed, to provide a model. [W]hatever is corrupted must be lopt away, she writes, as people assert their long forgotten...
Textual Features Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld for praising Elizabeth Rowe . She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington is the real author of...
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
Reception Helen Craik
Apparently the only journal to notice Adelaide de Narbonne was the Anti-Jacobin in January 1800: it wished that Craik had not left her own political stance inexplicit.
Craciun, Adriana, and Kari E. Lokke, editors. “The New Cordays: Helen Craik and British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793-1800”. Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, State University of New York Press, pp. 193-32.
213
Critic Shareen Robinson describes this novel as...
Textual Production Ann Batten Cristall
The publisher Joseph Johnson issued by subscription ABC 's Poetical Sketches: an important text in women's Romanticism.
Her title was the same as that of William Blake 's first publication, 1783. Critic Richard C. Sha
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Whateley Darwall
But most poems in this volume are occasional, more or less public. MWD wrote about buildings: the fake-medieval Hockley Abbey near Birmingham and the genuine medieval Kenilworth Castle. She wrote about Scotland: ballads...
Textual Features Eliza Fenwick
For this anthology EF gathered mostly improving pedagogical material, drawing on revered literary names like Shakespeare and Milton , as well as more recent and controversial writers like Thomas Chatterton and Helen Maria Williams ...
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...
Textual Production Elizabeth Gilding
Elizabeth Turner (formerly EG ) composed a poem entitled To Miss Helen Maria Williams , on Her Poem of Peru: it appeared the following month in the Gentleman's Magazine, only a few months after Peru was published.
Pitcher, Edward W. Signatures and Pseudonyms of the Eighteenth-Century British Magazines: An Annotated Index in Three Volumes.
politics Anne Grant
AG was a conservative both in party politics and gender politics. The radicalism of Helen Maria Williams provoked her to write, we detest the Rights of Man, and abominate those of Woman.
Grant, Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
3: 28
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Grant
In a passage that deploys all her own high rhetorical ability she seeks to prove that women's ability is normally inferior to men's. Wollstonecraft's book, which is so run after here, that there is no...
Textual Features Jane Harvey
The contents include descriptive and melancholy sonnets, satire, autobiography, and politics (including a poem on the horrors of slavery, addressed to William Wilberforce , and another about the sorrow of a woman whose lover has...
Textual Production Isabella Neil Harwood
This three-act romantic drama is founded on the novel by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre which was titled in its English translation by Helen Maria WilliamsPaul and Virginia, June 1795. After the first act, though...

Timeline

1788: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre published his popular...

Writing climate item

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: The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward's...

Women writers item

April 1789

The Gentleman's Magazine published Anna Seward 's selection of living celebrated Female Poets.

Late 1790: William Holland published a print of Burke...

National or international item

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...

Writing climate item

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: Charlotte Corday, a Royalist from Normandy,...

National or international item

13 July 1793

Charlotte Corday , a Royalist from Normandy, assassinated Marat as he lay in his bath.

Texts

Williams, Helen Maria. A Farewell, for Two Years, to England. T. Cadell, 1791.
Williams, Helen Maria. A Narrative of the Events which have taken place in France. J. Murray, 1815.
Williams, Helen Maria. A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade. T. Cadell, 1788, http://BL.
Williams, Helen Maria. A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, 1795. Research Publications, 1975.
Williams, Helen Maria. A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795. Editor Gifford, John, T. N. Longman, 1797.
Williams, Helen Maria. A Tour in Switzerland. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798, http://BLC.
Williams, Helen Maria. An Ode on the Peace. T. Cadell, 1783.
Williams, Helen Maria. Edwin and Eltruda, A Legendary Tale. T. Cadell, 1782.
Bending, Stephen et al. “General Introduction”. Helen Maria Williams, A Tour in Switzerland, vol. 1 (1798), edited by Stephen Bending et al., Pickering and Chatto, 2007, p. ix - xxi.
Williams, Helen Maria. “Introduction”. Julia, edited by Natasha Aleksiuk Duquette, Pickering and Chatto, 2010, p. xi - xxix.
Williams, Helen Maria. “Introduction and Chronology”. Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, edited by Neil Fraistat and Susan Sniader Lanser, Broadview, 2001, pp. 9-52.
Williams, Helen Maria. Julia. T. Cadell, 1790.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters from France Containing Many New Anecdotes. G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters from France, Containing a Great Variety of Interesting and Original Information. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1793.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters on the Events which have passed in France since the Restoration in 1815. Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1819.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England. T. Cadell, 1790.
Williams, Helen Maria. On the Late Persecution of the Protestants in the South of France. T. and G. Underwood, 1816.
Saint Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de. Paul and Virginia. Translator Williams, Helen Maria, G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795.
Humboldt, Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von, and Aimé Bonpland. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799-1804. Translator Williams, Helen Maria, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1821.
Williams, Helen Maria. Peru. T. Cadell, 1784, http://U of A Special Collections.
Williams, Helen Maria. Poems. Printed by A. Rivington and J. Marshall for T. Cadell, 1786.
Williams, Helen Maria. Poems on Various Subjects. G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823.
Humboldt, Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von. Researches, Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America. Translators Williams, Helen Maria and Aimé Bonpland, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, J. Murray and H. Colburn, 1814.
Williams, Helen Maria. Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic. G. G. and J. Robinson, 1801.