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
Travel Anne Plumptre
AP set out for France to visit Helen Maria Williams ; she stayed in France for nearly three years.
Plumptre, Anne. “Introduction”. Something New, edited by Deborah McLeod, Broadview, p. vii - xxix.
xxvii, x
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 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 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.
144
Publishing Anna Seward
The month after Louis XVI was guillotined, AS expressed her outrage at the developing Terror in France with an impassioned letter printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, urging her friend Helen Maria Williams to come home.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
200-1
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...
Leisure and Society Mariana Starke
MS and her family were great supporters of literature through the subscription system. She subscribed in 1781 to Anne Francis 's Poetical Translation of the Song of Solomon, from the original Hebrew, which was...
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 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
Literary responses Mary Wollstonecraft
The Gentleman's Magazine typified the response of the conservative press. It complained that our modern philosophers . . . try to inspire the poor of this country with jealousy and resentment against the rich, and...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
Again one of Yearsley's most perceptive readers was Anna Seward , who wrote to Helen Maria Williams on Christmas Day 1787 that Yearsley and Burns were both miracles . . . . Perhaps she has...

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