Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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...
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 Production
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
LMH
took issue with Helen Maria Williams
, anonymously, in the polemical Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits.
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, 1990.
Textual Production
Mary Hays
George Dyer suggested, about February 1797, that MH
should collaborate with Ann Batten Cristall
on an excellent poetical novel
qtd. in
Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827. Clarendon, 1993.
111
(that is a novel with poems inset, like Helen Maria Williams
's Julia). Since...
Textual Production
Hester Lynch Piozzi
HLP
was working on some literary, political, and philosophical dialogues to be called Una and Duessa, which were designed to counter the writings of Helen Maria Williams
.
Clifford, James L. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale). Clarendon Press, 1987.
359-60
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...
Textual Production
Ann Batten Cristall
The publisher Joseph Johnson
issued by subscription ABC
's Poetical Sketches: an important text in women's Romanticism.
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...
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...
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, 1996, p. vii - xxix.
xxvii, x
Travel
Amelia Opie
They travelled with Anne Plumptre
and stayed with Helen Maria Williams
. They went as far as Naples.
