Helen Maria Williams

17 June 1759 - 15 December 1827

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.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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...
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...
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...
Occupation	Hannah More	Controversy raged for years, and narrowed to a personal attack on HM , which pained her exceedingly. Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952. 175-6, 184 She was, she said, [b]attered, hacked, scalped, tomahawked qtd. in Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press, 1952. 185 —a choice of phraseology which associated herself...
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, 1809, 3 vols. 3: 28
Publishing	Fanny Aikin Kortright	Towards the end of her memoirs FAK notes that she wrote from the age of seventeen but did not earn until I was twenty-six. Kortright, Fanny Aikin. The Recollections of My Long Life. Printed for the author by Farmer and Sons, 1896. Her earliest publications were poems for the Guernsey Star (when she...
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, 1931. 200-1
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, 2001, pp. 193-32. 213 Critic Shareen Robinson describes this novel as...
Textual Features	Elizabeth Helme	The dialogue in these books is stilted and unnatural. The children (of whom Charlotte, the only girl, is outnumbered by half a dozen brothers) are represented as intensely eager to hear all about these heroes...
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...
Textual Features	Mrs F. C. Patrick	In the course of a busy plot Augusta is abducted, but saves herself from a forced marriage (her mother, the instigator of this outrage, affects to think her married in the sight of Heaven) by...
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 ...
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	Elizabeth Moody	The full title is A Sketch of Modern France. In a series of letters to a lady of fashion. Written in the years 1796 and 1797. In his preface Christopher Lake Moody vouches for...

Timeline

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Texts

Williams, Helen Maria. Souvenirs de la révolution française. Dondey-Dupré, 1827.

Williams, Helen Maria, and François Xavier de Maistre. The Leper of the City of Aoste: A Narrative. G. Cowie, 1817.

Bercenay, François Babié de, and Count Imbert de la Platière. The Political and Confidential Correspondence of Lewis the Sixteenth. Translator Williams, Helen Maria, G. and J. Robinson, 1803, 3 vols., http://BLC.