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	Author name Sort ascending	Excerpt
Textual Production	Charlotte Nooth	His De la littérature des Nègres in its original form reflects internationalism, anglophilia, and perhaps even proto-feminism. The title-page quotes Mary Robinson . The roll of honour of white activists for abolition and racial equality...
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...
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. 175-6, 184 She was, she said, [b]attered, hacked, scalped, tomahawked Jones, Mary Gwladys. Hannah More. Cambridge University Press. 185 —a choice of phraseology which associated herself...
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...
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...
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. Her earliest publications were poems for the Guernsey Star (when she...
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. 167n3 Even...
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...
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...
Textual Production	Mary Hays	George Dyer suggested, about February 1797, that MH should collaborate with Ann Batten Cristall on an excellent poetical novel Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827. Clarendon. 111 (that is a novel with poems inset, like Helen Maria Williams 's Julia). Since...
Textual Production	Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins	LMH took issue with Helen Maria Williams , anonymously, in the polemical Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits. Fergus, Jan. “Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins’s Anonymous Novels Identified”. Notes and Queries, Vol. 54 , No. 2, pp. 152-6. 155 Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
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...
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...
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...

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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, http://BLC.