SOURCE: Kennedy, Deborah. “Benevolent Historian: Helen Maria Williams and Her British Readers.” In Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, edited by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Kokke, pp. 317-330. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Kennedy considers how Williams successfully negotiated the cultural and political minefield she entered as a liberal female historian.]

Traditionally, the areas of politics and history have not been regarded as a woman's proper sphere of study or activity. If, even in the twentieth century, as Joan Wallach Scott has observed, the involvement of women in those fields has been problematic, then how much more so was that the case for women in the late eighteenth century,¹ when Catharine Macaulay was the only female historian of stature,² and Angelica Kauffman perplexed critics by surpassing her male contemporaries in the genre of history painting.³ What, then, did readers think of Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), a well-known poet of sensibility, with many friends in London's politically active Dissenting circles, who became famous for her books on the French Revolution? Her eight volumes of Letters from France (1790-1796) trace the development of the Revolution from the period of the Festival of the Federation in July 1790, when she visited France for the first time, to the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. Taking up permanent residence in France in 1792, Williams identified with the progressive principles of her Girondin friends, and continued to write in defence of liberty until her death in 1827. Her Letters from France became an important source of information for the British reading public at a time when the rights of men (and to a lesser degree the rights of women) were the subjects of vindication and vilification in the British press. The involvement of French women in the Revolution gave them a place in the political and historical record that challenged traditional definitions of their roles. Likewise, it was an age when the literary women of England who wrote about the events in France could be scorned as “strumpets,” laughed at as politicians in “petticoats,” or revered as “benevolent” historians. Each of these phrases was used to describe Williams at one point in time.

The responses to Williams's writing reflected the political divisions accentuated by the revolutionary debates and are thus characterized by their political allegiances and gender expectations. Williams's British reviewers reacted in one of three ways: they either refused to accept that she or any other woman was capable of writing on matters touching political affairs; or they accepted that a woman could write on such subjects, but they demanded that her work conform to traditional modes of political and historical discourse; or, finally, they championed the Letters from France as a unique and valuable work whose epistolary style and appeal to pathos set it apart—in a positive sense—from standard history.⁴ Such divergent positions are reflective of Williams's own ambivalence about how to classify her work. She shied away from the presumption of calling it history—a masculine category—and yet the very raison d'être of her books was to provide a record of experiences and events of lasting historical and political importance.

In the opening to her first volume of Letters from France, Williams explained why she had become such an ardent supporter of the Revolution: “this was not a time in which the distinctions of country were remembered. It was the triumph of human kind; it was man asserting the noblest privileges of his nature; and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world.”⁵ Although she claimed for herself the identity of a “citizen of the world” (echoing Richard Price in his “Discourse on the Love of Our Country”—the speech that provoked Edmund Burke to write his great counterrevolutionary book, Reflections on the Revolution in France), Williams realized that for an English woman to publish such jubilant support of the newly reborn French nation would expose her to charges that she was both unpatriotic and unfeminine.⁶ She tried to reassure her critics that she was not usurping the role of a male political observer; rather, she was reading the Revolution as a woman, or responding with her heart to the events in France: “my political creed is entirely an affair of the heart, for I have not been so absurd as to consult my head upon matters of which it is so incapable of judging” (1.1.66). Lacking the political knowledge and education that a male writer might possess, Williams stakes her claims instead on the power of a woman's ability to be moved by scenes of happiness, suffering, or injustice, and to judge them accordingly, even if she did not understand all of the political issues involved. Her assertion of the traditional view of women's emotional nature was not simply a rhetorical strategy used to deflect criticism: Williams's emotional sensitivity and her ability to express it were fundamental parts of her own self identity and her public identity as a poet of sensibility.

Over the course of the six years that she published the Letters from France, Williams became more knowledgeable and politically astute, but her signature, as it were, was still that of the “woman of feeling,” and favorable reviews of her work consistently emphasized its “feminine” ethos. For instance, the Analytical Review stated explicitly that “Her reflections on the French Revolution are truly feminine.”⁷ The statement (which implies a comparison to Burke's Reflections) registers the uniqueness of a historical moment when a reviewer could combine in the same sentence the words “revolution” and “feminine.” The Analytical Review went on to say that her Letters “confirmed the very favourable opinion we have entertained of the goodness of the writer's heart. … As the destruction of the Bastille was an event that affected every heart—even hearts not accustomed to the melting mood, it was natural to suppose that it would particularly touch a tender one—and every page of Miss Williams's book tells us, in an unequivocal tone, that her's is true to every soft emotion.”⁸ In the political climate of 1790, events like the fall of the Bastille were viewed from a perspective shaped by a culture of sensibility. Readers expected Williams to respond to scenes of injustice with her exemplary tender-heartedness.

Her literary persona formed a striking contrast to Mary Wollstonecraft's in a Vindication of the Rights of Men. While the first volume of Williams's Letters was partly a travel book and was written before Burke's book appeared, Wollstonecraft's Vindication was a direct and forceful reply to Burke.⁹ The English Review praised Wollstonecraft by saying, “The language may be thought by some too bold and pointed for a female pen; but when women undertake to write on masculine subjects, and reason as Miss Wollstonecraft does, we wish their language to be free from all female prettinesses, and to express with energy and perspicuity, the ideas they mean to convey.”¹⁰ Wollstonecraft seems to have succeeded in using the “rational forms of inquiry” that Greg Kucich has called a “crucial strategy” for “women historians seeking acceptance in a closed field of masculine activity.”¹¹ However, not all reviewers were pleased with Wollstonecraft's masculine persona: the Gentleman's Magazine ridiculed her as a gender-crossing military combatant, “armed cap-à-pied.”¹² On the other hand, according to one writer, Williams was a wholly feminine opponent to Burke. In the poem “On reading ‘Letters written from France in the summer of 1790 to a Friend in England, by Helen Maria Williams,’” Edward Jerningham depicts Burke as a knight with all the benefits of his masculine armor to protect him, and yet he is vanquished by Williams, a “lovely Maid,” dressed in a “flowing robe,” who

… tries no formal refutation
Of his elab'rate speculation,
Nor raves of Governments and Laws,
For she to Nature trusts her cause;
Makes to the heart her strong appeal,
Which all who have a heart must feel.(13)

Jerningham follows Williams's own argument in asserting that her strength resides in her rhetoric of sensibility, which enables her to retain her femininity even though she is writing about politics.¹⁴

However, by 1792, and certainly after the September Massacres of that year and the overthrow of the French monarchy, the tide of opinion in England turned against the Revolution—and against those, like Williams, who persisted in supporting its principles. Conservative propaganda flourished throughout England, and it is perhaps best represented by the popular visual design known as The Contrast (1792), which was engraved by Thomas Rowlandson.¹⁵ Simply put, it depicted British liberty as a virtuous woman in contrast to the blood-thirsty hag that represented French liberty. The Contrast would have been anathema for “a citizen of the world” like Williams who thought no nation should have the monopoly on liberty. Certainly Jerningham's poetic description of Williams in her flowing robes defending liberty illustrates in a telling way the distinction between her internationalist position and the divisive images represented in The Contrast, especially once political loyalties hardened after the outbreak of war between the two countries in 1793. It soon became clear that a woman's compassionate response to the events in France was no longer sufficient to excuse her from taking an interest in revolutionary politics. As we shall see, opponents of the Revolution argued that it simply was not proper for a woman to write about anything political at all, and they should instead devote themselves to their traditional roles as wives and mothers.

Many women writers took sides in the revolutionary debates, including Hannah More and Frances Burney. In her popular poem Village Politics (1792), More argued that women's interest in the French Revolution was as unthinking as their passion for French fashion; they were dazzled by anything French. In that poem, the loyal Sir John admonishes his wife when she asks him to tear down their good old English mansion and replace it with one in the French style. The political analogy is clear, and Sir John's lady, who likes “to do everything like the French,” needs to be kept in her place by her patriotic husband.¹⁶Village Politics and Hannah More's conservative tracts made a significant contribution to Church and King propaganda, but because she wrote as a Royalist, she did not think of herself as a political writer. Even when writing about the French Revolution she denied any interest in “entering far into political principles.”¹⁷ There was no contradiction in this for More, who insisted in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), that “I am not sounding an alarm to female warriors, or exciting female politicians: I hardly know which of the two is the most disgusting and unnatural character.”¹⁸ A similar position was held by Frances Burney who believed that politics was “not a feminine subject for discussion,”¹⁹ but that did not prevent her from writing her last novel The Wanderer (1814), set during the French Revolution, nor from publishing a pamphlet in 1793 to raise money for emigrant French clergy.²⁰ Burney and More were compelled to write about the critical events around them, even if it meant they were encroaching on subjects they believed women should normally avoid.

But Williams had no such reservations and had found her life's work in writing about revolutionary politics. Because of her high profile, she announced her return trip to France in a poem entitled A Farewell to England for Two Years (1791). When events in France became more violent, her situation was discussed openly in the press, and some writers used her example as a warning to others. In early 1793, a very public attempt was made to persuade her to return to England when her friend Anna Seward published a letter in Gentleman's Magazine, addressing her as a type of prodigal daughter.²¹ Calling her the “amiable, the benevolent Helen Williams,”²² Seward seemed to be speaking on behalf of the nation in appealing for the return of Britain's well-loved poetess. But Williams did not come back, and Seward's letter was followed by the publication of an entire book addressed to Williams, which was far more critical in tone. Laetitia Matilda Hawkins's two-volume Letters on the Female Mind, Addressed to Miss H. M. Williams, with Particular Reference to Her Letters from France (1793) urged Williams to give up politics and resume writing elegant (i.e., apolitical) poetry. Though using the inclusive phrase “let us,” she was concerned less with reforming Williams than with reinforcing women's traditional roles: “Let us, my dear madam, in the mean time take care of our homes; let us discharge our duties.”²³ According to Hawkins, not only was the subject of government one that women could not “discuss with propriety,” but women lacked the capacity and the experience to understand such subjects.²⁴ Whatever Williams's eyewitness status and the authenticity of her sources, the fact that she was a woman would continue to be held against her. In 1804 the British Critic maintained that Williams was “not destitute of intellectual ability, but we unequivocally deny her being possessed of those qualities of mind which are essential to decide on the profound subjects of the political affairs and constitutions of nations.”²⁵ Such arguments became standard components of conservative discourse, in which “pert misses” were disparaged for presuming “to pass judgement on the political rights and conditions of nations.”²⁶

Among contemporary writers, this view was sharply opposed by Charlotte Smith, who defended women's interest in political affairs in the defiant Preface to one of her own novels on the Revolution, Desmond (1792).²⁷ The continuing success of the Letters from France was itself evidence that, despite resistance, a woman could demonstrate an interest in these matters and become something of an authority on them. Williams was determined to write a comprehensive account of the French Revolution. The eight volumes chronicle changing events, but her characteristically compassionate yet dignified narrative voice gives coherence to the Letters, as she implores her readers to embrace the ideals of the “friends of liberty” (1.4.117, 1.4.152, 2.4.1). Though her mood can veer from enthusiasm to indignation, she maintains a decorum in her writing that contrasts with the graphic imagery used by many of those who wrote about the Revolution. For instance, Mary Wollstonecraft, in the conclusion to the first volume of the unfinished Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), compares revolutionary violence to a necessary purging of the bowels, in which “excrementitious humours [exude] from the contaminated body.”²⁸ Lewis Goldsmith describes the rancid food in French prisons as “a little putrescent meat, and vegetables full of dirt, hair, and worms.”²⁹ In contrast, the problem of hunger in the prisons is daintily depicted by Williams using figurative language in the following manner: “famine scowled along these gloomy mansions” (2.2.112). Her Letters possess the politeness of an eighteenth-century Bluestocking, which enables her to retain a ladylike distance from the horrors she must recount. This was in keeping with her own self-presentation as a spokesperson for the civilized ethos of an “enlightened” age (1.2.205). Frequently reasserting the importance of this period in world history, she regarded her own work as necessary to correct the misleading accounts written by counter-revolutionary writers (4.4.181). She continued her appeal to sensibility, alternating between tearful vignettes and almost business-like accounts of military actions. Her desire in 1793 for “equal laws, wise instruction, rational faith, and virtuous conduct” (1.4.154) was no different from her wish in 1796 “to trace humanity pouring balm into the wounds of the oppressed” (2.4.2). Such words epitomise the nature of this “benevolent historian.” These are enlightenment ideals rendered in the discourse of sensibility.

Williams had many advocates in England, and, since the political alliances of individual journals were sharply drawn in the 1790s, Whig periodicals reviewed Williams's work much more favorably than Tory journals. Supportive journals like the New Annual Register regarded Williams with respect for having the initiative to write about the important events of the Revolution. That journal angrily dismissed Laetitia Matilda Hawkins's book for its contemptuous efforts to discredit Williams and its “endeavour to excite [others] against an ingenious and lively female, for having spirit enough to think for herself, and to write on topics, with which the greater part of her sex are precluded from being acquainted by their confined and defective education.”³⁰ This review registers the fact that, at least for some readers, Williams's work on the Revolution was a pioneering effort that opened up the possibility that women could write about subjects which had traditionally been reserved for men.

The more conservative reviews campaigned against women's involvement in politics by arguing that they were transgressing proper codes of female behavior. In France itself, the year 1793 saw a backlash against female activists,³¹ and many prominent women suffered unrelenting attacks in the French press, as Elisabeth Roudinesco has shown in her study of Théroigne de Méricourt;³² and Mary Seidman Trouille in her work on Madame Roland.³³ An analysis of the English reviews of Helen Maria Williams's books shows that conservative British journals maintained a certain decorum in the early 1790s, while much harsher comments appeared only in the postrevolutionary period. This review from the Tory British Critic is typical of the tone of the earlier period:

When a young lady writes, with dogmatical decision, upon subjects which have divided the sentiments of the best, wisest and most experienced of mankind, we think it by no means detracts from our gallantry, or good humour, if we confess it to be our opinion that she might easily have been occupied in better and more fruitful employments.³⁴

While the British Critic here sounds rather like a disapproving but concerned father, it became less patient with Williams as the years wore on, though the worst name that they used for her was “misguided female” in a review of February 1796.³⁵Gentleman's Magazine tended to be more scornful and sarcastic but stopped short of outright vitriol. However, attacks on Williams in the press worsened over the next few years, a period of continued government suppression of radical activities in Britain.³⁶ The Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner, founded in 1797, and its successor the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review hurled vicious insults at Williams and other British men and women who could in any way be described as radicals or as reformers, and the tone of other conservative attacks degenerated as well. For instance, while the liberal Analytical Review had referred sympathetically to “the elegant pen of Miss Williams,” in 1801 the conservative British Critic gave up its own decorous tone and chastised Williams for what they called her “polluted pen.”³⁷ Whether her pen was “elegant” or “polluted” had more to do with the journal's politics than Williams's style of writing.

The insults directed against women who took an interest in the French Revolution were typified by those in the book Unsexed Females (1798), by Richard Polwhele. As the term “unsexed” implies, and as critics such as Steven Blakemore and Eleanor Ty have documented, women interested in politics were by definition “fallen” women.³⁸ “Unsexed” really meant “oversexed,” as Claudia Johnson has pointed out.³⁹ Critics were alert to any suggestion of sexual impropriety, and frequent references were made to Williams's relationship with John Hurford Stone. In a vicious attack on her book about Switzerland, the Anti-Jacobin registered its shock that the papers should rely on Williams, whom they called “Mrs. Stone,” as a source of information, since she was, in their words “a Poissarde more bloody, … a st—mp-t more shameless, than any which … Paris ever vomited forth.”⁴⁰ Such vile sexual insults were typical of the Anti-Jacobin, which sometimes deprecated women writers en masse as the “Wollstonecraft School,” even though Wollstonecraft had died in 1797.⁴¹ In one instance, Williams was paired with Madame de Staël, as we see in this quotation from a poem published in the Anti-Jacobin in May 1798, where Williams and Germaine de Staël are depicted as “[working] their fingers to the bone, / And cutting their Petticoats to rags / To make … bright Three Colour'd Flags.”⁴² The startling image of the women writers using their petticoats or undergarments to make French flags exposes their bodies to the public eye, and implies that they would sacrifice feminine modesty or chastity for their political cause. Furthermore, the roughness and violence attributed to Staël and Williams in this depiction is of a kind usually associated with lower-class female radicals in Paris. The author ignores Williams's middle-class status and Staël's aristocratic status (by marriage), implying that their political writings make them of a piece with transgressive women of a lower class, with whom neither Staël nor Williams would have been pleased to be compared. This blurring of differences in class and politics was also a feature of the attacks on women in the French press, as Trouille has observed in her study of the comparisons made between Madame Roland and the more militant Olympe de Gouges.⁴³

It served the purpose of conservative propaganda to simplify revolutionary politics by ignoring such differences.⁴⁴ While such remarks about Williams in the press were, in general, only made in the post-revolutionary period, earlier examples occur in the private correspondence of both Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke. The following comment is among Walpole's many vituperative remarks about the British women who supported the French Revolution; it is from a letter dated 26 July 1791, in which he refers disparagingly to Williams and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, comparing them to poissardes who were “invited to the Crown and Anchor, and had let their nails grow accordingly; but somehow or other no poissonnières were there, and the two prophetesses had no opportunity that day of exercising their talents or talons.”⁴⁵ Here Williams and Barbauld, both middle-class women writers, are once again categorized among the “poissonnières” or poissardes, terms used for fishwomen, marketwomen, or lower-class women in general. Walpole's deliberate play on the words “talents” and “talons” implies that what they think of as their literary talents are no better than the bestial “talons” or claws attributed to the unruly French women, who themselves were often caricatured in the French press. Poissardes were frequently represented in satirical prints as well, one of which James Gillray used to warn British women away from revolutionary politics. His didactic cartoon was based on an anonymous French print depicting incidents that occurred in France in the spring of 1791, when groups of nuns were beaten by bands of women who broke into their convents.⁴⁶ Gillray's print is dated June 1792 and entitled A Representation of the horrid barbarities practised upon the nuns by the Fish-women on breaking into the nunneries in France. Its inscription reads: “This print is dedicated to the Fair sex of Great-Britain & intended to point out the very dangerous effects which may arise to Themselves if they do not exert themselves to” stop the mob from gaining power.⁴⁷ The poissardes are oversized figures—giantesses—attacking the nuns whose bodies are exposed in an indecent manner. The analogy is clear: female modesty itself is threatened by revolutionary politics.⁴⁸

Edmund Burke, whose writings contributed to the alarmist climate of the counterrevolutionary period, addressed the issue of female transgression directly in an important private letter of 1795, where he warned his friend Mrs. Crewe about the dangerous influence of women like Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. He began by admonishing Mrs. Crewe for not taking seriously enough the danger these women represented: “this is no trifling game they are playing”:

I hope and supplicate, that all provident and virtuous Wives and Mothers of families, will employ all the just influence they possess over their Husbands and Children, to save themselves and their families from the ruin that the Mesdames de Staals and the Mesdames Rolands, and the Mesdames de Sillery, and the Mrs. Helena Maria Williams, and the Mrs. Woolstencrafts &c &c &c &c &c and all that Clan of desperate, Wicked, and mischievously ingenious Women, who have brought, or are likely to bring Ruin and shame upon all those that listen to them. The Sex has much influence. Let the honest and prudent save us from the Evils with which we are menaced by the daring, the restless, and the unprincipled.⁴⁹

Five of the most prominent English and French women writers of the 1790s have made Burke's list of female offenders: Staël, Roland, Genlis (Sillery), Williams, and Wollstonecraft. By using their names in a plural form and adding several “etceteras,” he even augments the threat by making them seem part of a growing army of dangerous women, evoking a fear of the mob, like a many-headed hydra.⁵⁰ In opposition to this monstrosity are the “honest” and “prudent” mothers and wives, who are a source of stability, unlike the “restless” “clan” of “Wicked” women who support, in whatever way, the politics of the Revolution. Burke's women, defined by their perceived virtue, belong to one of two categories, like those used in the popular design of The Contrast.

Similar oppositional imagery was used by the Scottish writer Anne Grant in a poem of the postrevolutionary period entitled “A Familiar Epistle to A Friend,” which sought to chasten radical women. Although her poem revealed some of the difficulties of her own life as a female poet, Grant accepted her traditional role and subordinated her literary career to her family responsibilities. She acknowledged Williams's spotless early reputation as a poet of “the chaste classic Muse” (177), but, as far as Grant was concerned, everything went wrong once Williams went to France and became so drunk with liberty that she joined the revolutionary “demons” (183), threatening social order:⁵¹

               With virtues, and graces, and beauties beside,
The delight of her friends, of her country the pride,
Say, who could to ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ their suffrage refuse,
Or who not be charmed with her chaste classic Muse?
To the passion for liberty giving loose rein,
At length she flew off to carouse on the Seine;
And growing inebriate while quaffing the draught,
Equality's new-fangled doctrines she taught;
And murder and sacrilege calmly surveyed;
In the new pandemonium those demons had made;
Seine's blood-crimsoned waters with apathy eyed,
While the glories of old father Thames she decried.(52)

This passage from Grant's poem is like a compendium of negative images of the Revolution, a mix of drunkenness, murder, and madness. She believed that contact with France immediately turned Williams into a “loose” woman, who transgressed sexual and moral codes of behavior. Grant's before-and-after pictures act as a warning to her female readers and vividly recall the images of virtuous English liberty juxtaposed against evil French liberty in The Contrast, as if the story of Williams's life during the revolutionary decade were emblematized by the contrasting iconography of that design.

The proliferation of warnings, pronouncements, and images of “unsexed” females at the end of the eighteenth century and into the beginning of the nineteenth century demonstrates the efforts to control women's literary and political activities. They often consisted of gross personal insults, distortion of facts, and fearmongering. However, Williams was somewhat shielded from the attacks against her because she had little access to British publications while living in Paris during the war years. When she did respond to her critics, she took the moral high road, proclaiming in the preface to a book published in 1801 that she would continue to write despite “the censure which has been thrown on writers of the female sex who have sometimes employed their pens on political subjects.”⁵³ She settled into an authorial persona that she felt was justified by her role as an “eyewitness” to events in France, and in fact hoped that her books would “make a part of that marvellous story which the eighteenth century has to record to future times.”⁵⁴

Williams would make no claim for the title of historian, however, even though she was “treading on the territory of History,”⁵⁵ because:

In the serious annals of history, all is told with calm and with method; but I am not a historian, I have only hazarded in the preceding pages to express my own sentiments during the course of the revolution. Many others will search for the revolution in books, but I remember it; the incidents of this recital are in my memory and the emotions that they produced are also in my heart.⁵⁶

From the beginning of her career to the end, Williams argued that her presence on the scene and her emotional commitment to revolutionary ideals gave legitimacy to her work, and her reviewers acknowledged her credibility as a reliable, if partisan, eyewitness of events in France: “Few English women, or even English men, have enjoyed a more ample opportunity of observing … the revolutions in France.”⁵⁷ But what could these observations be called, exactly? A reluctance to accept the title of politician or historian is understandable when we consider that no proper titles or categories existed for a woman who did the type of writing that Williams did. After all, “female politicians” were viewed as monstrous, and by definition historians were, to quote one of her reviewers, “grave old men.”⁵⁸ A similar problem faced Madame de Staël whose work Considerations of the Principal Events of the French Revolution (1818) has resisted categorization since it is, in Charlotte Hogsett's words, “more than memoirs,” but not “a political work in the traditional sense.”⁵⁹ Praising it as subversive of genre, Linda Orr has sought to reclaim Staël's book, which, with elements like “autobiography, satire, travelogue, [and] political philosophy,” has a “diversity” that “pushes the limits of history.”⁶⁰ Two hundred years ago, Sophie Grandchamp said something similar about Williams's political writing: “Turn by turn, you are a friend, a historian, a novelist, a poet, a statesman, a politician, a critic, even a theologian.”⁶¹

The fact that the Letters from France did not fit easily into any traditional categories frustrated some reviewers. For instance, although the English Review wrote favorably of her work, praising its philanthropy, they were disappointed that it lacked the clarity and structure of “historical composition,”⁶² which should follow closely the “chain of events.”⁶³ They criticized the emotional content and what they and the European Magazine called the “florid” qualities of her style: “it would have been still more interesting had Miss Williams confined herself more to facts and circumstances, and been sparing of heightening of words and of her own emotions and opinions.”⁶⁴ For some readers, then, Williams's sensibility and anecdotal narrative diminished the value of her historical accounts. The English Review had criticized her in 1792 as writing not for “sagacious politicians” but only for women, or “politicians in petticoats,”⁶⁵ an image that had been used earlier in the eighteenth century to satirize the women in Queen Anne's court who seemed to be usurping male power, and, prior to that, to describe female activists of the English Civil War period as “petticoat petitioners.”⁶⁶ In this case, however, the English Review uses the term “politicians in petticoats” to relegate Williams's writings to the superficial realm of “female prettinesses” that they had disparaged earlier.⁶⁷

While some reviewers criticized the Letters from France for lacking structure and clarity, the Critical Review, in an article in 1801, sympathized with the problems Williams faced regarding readers' expectations of historical writing:

it is well known with what difficulty the historian is prevented from becoming a partisan in his narration, even of events long since elapsed, and in which he could have no personal interest. But if this be true with respect to grave old men, how can it be supposed with the refinement of feeling and the delicacy of organization of the fair writer before us, that her imagination should not occasionally be a little too much exalted, and her colouring a little too vivid?⁶⁸

This reader argued that if impartiality is difficult even for an educated historian, it is unfair to expect it of a person without such a background. But that should not preclude her from writing about history and politics:

If [the Letters from France] want the profound investigation of the statesman or legislator,—if they are destitute of those political discussions, in which historians of the higher order are fond of indulging,—they will be found to contain what is more valuable,—a picture of the times. What they lose in stateliness, they gain in interest; if they plunge not deeply into the intrigues of cabinets, or the views of politicians, they delineate correctly the fluctuations of popular sentiment; and if they enter but little on the disgusting and generally tiresome details of senatorial debates or military exploits, they paint the manners, and, by variety of engaging anecdotes, expose the human heart.⁶⁹

The Critical Review gave Williams the acceptance she had hoped to gain. She was not criticized for lacking the education of a male historian, nor was she criticized for being a woman writing on politics; instead, her work was valued in a journal (albeit a like-minded one) that allowed her to join their ranks as a “friend of liberty.”⁷⁰

In 1796, the liberal Analytical Review referred to her both as a “historian” and as “our benevolent historian.”⁷¹ This presents an image of Williams that is far removed from the degrading caricatures promulgated in the later conservative press, where even terms like “benevolence” and “humanity” were ridiculed because of their association with revolutionary discourse. The complimentary adjective “benevolent” is one worth reclaiming, and it was intended in the Analytical Review as a tribute to the way that Williams wrote about the French Revolution, as she drew her readers' attention to scenes of pathos involving the victims of the Reign of Terror. We don't know if Williams would have preferred being called simply the “English Historian of the French Revolution,” as her nephew described her after her death.⁷² But perhaps she would have been willing to accept the title “benevolent historian” from her peers, for, with its qualifying adjective, it acknowledges the deeply felt concern for humanity that first prompted her to write about the French Revolution and that sustained her as she recorded its dramatic history in the eight volumes of her Letters from France.

Notes

1. See Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 15-27, 178-98.

2. See Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 130-38.

3. See Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “Kauffman and the Art of Painting in England,” in Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England, ed. Wendy Wassyng Roworth (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 86.

4. For a brief overview of Williams's critical reception see Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Introduction, An Eye-Witness Account of the French Revolution, by Helen Maria Williams (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 1-30.

5. All references to Williams's multivolume Letters from France will be to the modern reprint Letters from France, eight volumes in two, intro. Janet Todd (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975) and will be cited in the text, indicating the series number, the volume number, and the page number. The eight volumes are divided into two series of four volumes each. Reviews of the Letters from France (LF) will cite the series and volume number. This passage is taken from 1.1.14.

6. Richard Price, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” in Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 181. Price gave his speech celebrating the French Revolution at the meeting for the 1688 Revolution Society, a club of Whigs and Dissenters, where the year before Helen Maria Williams's mentor Reverend Andrew Kippis had been the guest speaker.

7. Rev. of Williams's Letters written in France in the summer, 1790 (LF 1.1), in the Analytical Review 8 (September-December 1790): 431.

8. Rev. of Williams's Letters written in France in the summer, 1790 (LF 1.1), in the Analytical Review 8 (September-December 1790): 431-432.

9. See Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992), 90, and Janet Todd, introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), xii.

10. Rev. of the second edition of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in the English Review (January 1791): 61.

11. Greg Kucich, “Romanticism and Feminist Historiography,” in The Wordsworth Circle 24 (Summer 1993): 136.

12. Rev. of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in Gentleman's Magazine 61 (February 1791): 151.

13. Jerningham's poem was published in the Universal Magazine 18 (December 1790): 472.

14. This was something that Williams admired most in her friend Madame Roland: her ability to discuss “the most important political questions” without any loss of feminine dignity. See Helen Maria Williams, Souvenirs de la Révolution française, trans. Charles Coquerel (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1827), 72.

15. See Jan Wellington's essay in this volume for a copy of this engraving. The Contrast was designed by Lord George Murray and engraved by Thomas Rowlandson. See David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine (London: British Museum, 1989), 119.

16. This passage from Hannah More's Village Politics is referred to in Prickett, England and the French Revolution, (London: Macmillan, 1989), 160. The entire poem is printed in the anthology British Literature 1780-1830, eds. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 210-216.

17. See Hannah More, Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont (1793) from The Works of Hannah More, 11 volumes (London: Henry G. Bohn), 2: 407. Hannah More was also one of many women who found a “socially acceptable” way to be involved in the politics of the day by contributing to the British war effort through fund-raising and sewing for British troops. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 261.

18. Hannah More, from Chapter One, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), in Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed. Robert Hole (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 126.

19. This is quoted in a letter dated 6 July 1796 from Frances Burney to Dr. Charles Burney, Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, volume 3, ed. Joyce Hemlow (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 186.

20. Entitled Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy: Earnestly Submitted to the Humane Consideration of the Ladies of Britain (1793), the pamphlet was preceded by a two-page apology justifying “on the grounds of benevolence for the entry of a female into public affairs.” It seems, then, that the defence of “benevolence” was employed by female writers of various political persuasions. See Burney, Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney 3: 18, note.

21. Seward's letter to Williams, dated 17 January 1793, can be found in the Letters of Anna Seward, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1811), 3: 202-209. It was published in the Gentleman's Magazine (February 1793): 108-10.

22. Anna Seward, letter to Helen Maria Williams, 17 January 1793, in Letters of Anna Seward, 3: 204.

23. Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits. Addressed to Miss H. M. Williams, 2 vols. (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793), 1:117.

24. Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Letters on the Female Mind, 1:5, 1:25.

25. Rev. of Williams's edition of The Political and Confidential Correspondence of Lewis the Sixteenth, in British Critic 23 (April 1804): 430-431.

26. William Beloe, The Sexagenarian; or the Recollections of a Literary Life, 2 vols. 2nd. ed. (London: Rivington, 1818), 1: 363.

27. For this passage from the preface of Desmond, see the introductory essay to this volume, 16, 18-19.

28. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 386.

29. Lewis Goldsmith, Female Revolutionary Plutarch (London, 1806), 3: 268.

30. See the review of Hawkins's Letters on the Female Mind, in the New Annual Register (1793): 277.

31. In October 1793, women's political clubs in France were outlawed by the Jacobin government in a campaign to suppress women's political activity. See Ruth Graham, “Loaves and Liberty: Women in the French Revolution” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 236-54. In England the stability of the family was asserted as an essential component of political stability.

32. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Madness and Revolution: The Lives and Legends of Théroigne de Méricourt, trans. Martin Thom (London: Verso, 1991).

33. See Mary Seidman Trouille, “Revolution in the Boudoir: Madame Roland's Subversion of Rousseau's Feminine Ideals” in Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 163-92.

34. See the review of Williams's Letters from France … and Particularly Respecting the Campaign of 1792, (LF 1: 3 and 4), in the British Critic 2 (November 1793): 244-252, 244.

35. Review of Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes (LF 2: 3), in the British Critic 7 (February 1796): 210.

36. The last years of the eighteenth century saw the naval mutinies of 1797 and the Irish revolt of 1798; habeas corpus was again suspended (April 1798 to March 1801) and legislation passed to outlaw radical societies and unions. See H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789-1815 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 40-41.

37. See the review of Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes (LF 2: 3), in Analytical Review 23 (January 1796): 19, and the review of Williams's Sketches of … the French Republic in the British Critic 17 (1801): 583.

38. See Steven Blakemore, “Revolution and the French Disease: Laetitia Matilda Hawkins's Letters to Helen Maria Williams” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500‐1900] 36 (1996): 673-691; and Eleanor Ty, Unsex'd Revolutionaries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

39. Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9.

40. See the Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner, 30 April 1798: 233.

41. Williams was also mentioned in a review by William Heath of Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice in the Anti-Jacobin Review, 3 May 1799: 55-58. According to one critic, Heath denounced many radical works, but it was “the works of the feminist writers of the 1790s that Heath most often singled out for condemnation.” He called them the “Wollstonecraft School.” See Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, 1798-1800 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 106.

42. This was part of the poem “A Consolatory Address to His Gun-Boats, by Citizen Muskein,” printed in the Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner, 14 May 1798: 312-13.

43. Mary Seidman Trouille, “Revolution in the Boudoir,” 187.

44. As Albert Goodwin has shown, even reformers who were “pillars of middle-class respectability” were depicted as “anarchists” plotting “the violent overthrow” of church and state. Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 25.

45. Horace Walpole, letter to Mary Berry, 26 July 1791, in Horace Walpole's Correspondence with Mary and Agnes Berry, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 11: 320.

46. The anonymous French engraving La discipline patriotique is reprinted as illustration number 33 by Catherine Marand-Fouquet, who explains that 9 April 1791 was the height of this disorder. See La femme au temps de La Révolution (Paris: Stock/Laurence Pernoud, 1989), 151, 410-411.

47. The Gillray print is found in David Bindman, Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum, 1989), 103.

48. For a discussion of the French print see Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 312-14.

49. Edmund Burke, letter to Mrs. John Crewe, 11 August 1795, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. 8, ed. R. B. McDowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 304.

50. Another print entitled Women's Political Meeting in a Church, by Chérieux, particularly conveys the idea of women's political activity as wild, threatening, and dissolute. See Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses, 325.

51. Stephen C. Behrendt discusses Grant's poem briefly in his essay “British Women Poets and the Reverberations of Radicalism in the 1790s,” in Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 88.

52. Anne Grant's poem “A Familiar Epistle to a Friend” (1802) is reprinted in Women Romantic Poets 1785-1832: An Anthology, ed. Jennifer Breen (London: Dent, 1992), 86-93. This passage is from lines 178-85.

53. Helen Maria Williams, preface to Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century. In a Series of Letters (London: Robinson, 1801), n. p.

54. Williams, Poems on Various Subjects (London: Whittaker, 1823), x.

55. Williams, Poems on Various Subjects, x.

56. Williams, Souvenirs de la Révolution française, 199-200.

57. Rev. of Williams's Sketches, in the Monthly Review 35 (1801): 82.

58. Rev. of Williams's Sketches, in the Critical Review 31 (February 1801): 184.

59. Charlotte Hogsett, The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 140, 141.

60. Linda Orr, “Outspoken Women and the Rightful Daughter of the Revolution: Madame de Staël's Considérations sur la Révolution Française,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 134.

61. Sophie Grandchamp, “Lettre à l'auteur,” in Aperçu de l'état des moeurs et des opinions dans la République française vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1801), vi.

62. Review of Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France (LF 2: 1 and 2), in the English Review 26 (October 1795): 248.

63. Review of Williams's Letters from France (LF 1: 2), in the English Review 20 (July 1792): 57.

64. Review of Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes (LF 2: 3), in the English Review 26 (November 1795): 363 and in European Magazine 28 (Nov. 1795): 341.

65. Review of Williams's Letters from France (LF 1: 2), in the English Review 20 (July 1792): 57.

66. The term “petticoat government” was used in 1702 to describe both the reign of Queen Anne and a matriarchal household, the latter of which was objected to in a rebuttal entitled The Prerogative of the Breeches (Oxford English Dictionary). On the large numbers of female petitioners in the Civil War period see Patricia Higgins, “The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners,” Politics, Religion, and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Manning (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 204.

67. See the review of the second edition of Wollstonecraft's, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in the English Review (January 1791): 61.

68. Rev. of Williams's Sketches, in the Critical Review 31 (February 1801): 184.

69. Rev. of Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes (LF 2.3), in the Critical Review 16 (January 1796): 1.

70. The term “friend of liberty” is used in a review of Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France (LF 2.1 and 2), in the Critical Review 14 (August 1795): 361. The appellation “friend of liberty,” also refers specifically to British radicals associated with English reform and revolutionary societies such as the London Corresponding Society. See Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

71. See the review of Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes (LF 2.3), in the Analytical Review 23 (January 1796): 22, 23.

72. Athanase Coquerel, “Reply to Dr. Strauss's Book ‘Life of Jesus,’” in Voices of the Church, in Reply to Dr. D. F. Strauss, ed. Rev. J. R. Beard (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1845), 27.