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
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.
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 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 ...
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 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
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 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...
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...
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

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