[In the following excerpt, Feldman discusses Williams's published writings and their reception by her contemporaries.]

Helen Maria Williams, best known for her eyewitness chronicles of the French Revolution and her influential salon in Paris, was also a poet who could not resist weaving verse into her novels and even into her translation of another author's work. She received her education from her Scots mother, Helen Hay. Her father, Charles Williams, a Welsh army officer, died when she was still a child, and her mother took her and her younger sister, Cecilia, to live in Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the border with Scotland. In 1781 Helen went to London. Andrew Kippis, a leading dissenting minister and family friend, became her mentor and introduced her to Elizabeth Montagu, Frances Burney, Anna Seward, Benjamin Franklin, George Romney, William Hayley, and other writers and intellectuals. Just as important, he edited and helped her publish her first book, Edwin and Eltruda, in 1782. A long antiwar poem, it recounts the tale of a woman who loses her lover and her father to a pointless war. The poem's success enabled Williams's mother and sister to join her in London. Eventually Williams's London circle came to include William Godwin, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Samuel Johnson, Sarah Siddons, and Edmund Burke.

An Ode on the Peace (1783) welcomes the end of the American Revolution and foresees a time when Britain will achieve similar democratic and economic prosperity, fostering a new age for the arts. It was published by subscription and was well received. Peru: a Poem. In Six Cantos (1784) is an epyllion about the conquered indigenous peoples of South America, examining the impact of war on domestic life and on the sensibilities of its victims. Anna Seward admired it enough to publish “Sonnet To Miss Williams, on her Epic Poem Peru,” beginning “Poetic sister, who with daring hand … Hast seiz'd the Epic lyre—with art divine.”¹ Williams included all of her previously published poetry along with some new pieces in a two-volume collection simply entitled Poems (1786), dedicated to the Queen. The nearly fifteen hundred subscribers, whose names fill seventy-six pages, include Joanna Baillie, the duchess of Devonshire, David Hume, Hannah More, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Anna Seward, Sarah Siddons, Horace Walpole, and Thomas Wharton. Among the poems are “An Epistle to Dr. Moore,” who had treated her during a serious illness, an elegy, hymns, scriptural paraphrases, and songs, as well as the “Sonnet to Twilight,” which William Wordsworth admired and later anthologized. Wordsworth's earliest published poem, in fact, was entitled “Sonnet, on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress” (1787).²

In 1788 Williams published A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade, which, in the stylized manner of much antislavery literature, portrays the domestic realm victimized by commerce and war. That same year Williams visited her sister, Cecilia, who had married a Protestant minister, Athanase Coquerel, and gone to live in France. Williams arrived just before the Festival of the Federation. “The impressions of this unforgetable day,” she wrote, “determined my political opinions forever.”³ Her novel, Julia, rewrites Rousseau's Julie; ou, la nouvelle Héloïse and contains “The Bastille,” a poem espousing the ideals of the French Revolution. Her heroine is a cultivated woman of sensibility who struggles against an illicit love. The narrative is interwoven with poems expressing libertarian ideals, the joys of nature, and the pleasure of philanthropic acts. Mary Wollstonecraft was delighted with the novel, and reviewers praised it.

Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790, to a Friend in England (1790) describes revolutionary events with enthusiasm and highlights the love story of Williams's friends Monique Coquerel and her husband, Augustin du Fossé. She wrote, “I am glad you think that a friend's having been persecuted, imprisoned, maimed, and almost murdered under the antient government of France, is a good excuse for loving the revolution. What, indeed, but friendship, could have led my attention from the annals of imagination to the records of politics; from the poetry to the prose of human life?”⁴ The epistolary form of the work gives a sense of spontaneity and immediacy to her argument that the English have misunderstood the Revolution and that they can learn from it. The book made a splash among a British reading public eager for firsthand news of France.

Before revisiting Paris, Williams published A Farewell, for Two Years, to England (1791), a poem answering recent criticism of the French Revolution. She traveled back and forth across the channel several times before returning to Paris in the summer of 1792, in time to witness the monarchy's overthrow. There her romantic involvement with John Hurford Stone, a married man who had subscribed to her Poems (1786), caused talk back home. But in the spirit of revolutionary times, Williams rejected the values of bourgeois respectability.

She knew most of the Jacobin and Girondist leaders, including especially Marie Roland, the most politically powerful woman in Paris, as well as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, who attended her salons. Wollstonecraft told her sister, Everina, “Miss Williams has behaved very civilly to me and I shall visit her frequently, because I rather like her, and I meet french company at her house. Her manners are affected, yet the simple goodness of her hearts [sic] continually breaks through the varnish, so that one would be more inclined, at least I should, to love than admire her.—Authorship is a heavy weight for female shoulders especially in the sunshine of prosperity.”⁵ After 1792 Williams lived abroad permanently, never to return to England. For the next quarter-century she recorded her impressions of all the major political events in France for British readers and not only became a major conduit of information but also had significant influence on public opinion.

Williams's association with the Girondists colored her accounts. “To Dr. Moore” was written for her friend Dr. John Moore, a well-known British social critic. The poem argues that even though they are far apart geographically, she in France and he in England, they are bonded by their sympathy for the Revolution, undaunted by British criticism of political events. Letters from France: Containing Many New Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution, and the Present State of French Manners (1792) implicitly replies to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Williams argues that France has learned the lesson of freedom from Britain but will soon surpass its mentor. Laetitia Matilda Hawkins published a book-length attack on Williams and the Revolution in her Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits; Addressed to Miss H. M. Williams, with Particular Reference to her Letters from France (1793).

In 1793 the Girondists were defeated, and Marie Roland and others close to Williams were executed. Williams herself was arrested in October, as were other British citizens. She was incarcerated in the Luxembourg prison along with her mother and sister, but after the intervention of friends, she was sent to an English convent, and in November she was placed under house arrest. During her imprisonment Williams translated her friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul et Virginie (1788). In Paul and Virginia (1795) she excised some of Saint-Pierre's prose and interjected some of her own original sonnets. Paul and Virginia became Williams's most frequently reprinted work, popular throughout the nineteenth century. The reviews were generally positive. The Critical Review found Williams qualified “not only to transfuse every beauty of the original, but to embellish it with new and peculiar graces.”⁶ In Williams's next collection of letters she described her experiences in prison, along with those of other prisoners. Many who had known her in England, including Anna Seward and Hester Lynch Piozzi, found disturbing Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France from the Thirty-first of May 1793 till the Twenty-eighth of July 1794, for she continued to support the Revolution despite her revulsion at its violence. “Liberty,” declared Williams, “is innocent of the outrages committed under its borrowed sanction.”⁷ Her reputation suffered as her work and character were savaged by the Gentleman's Magazine and the Anti-Jacobin Review. Horace Walpole called her a “scribbling trollop.”⁸

After her release from custody, strangers were barred from Paris, and Williams moved to Versailles. Then, fearing persecution, she and Stone fled to Switzerland. It may have been simply her anti-Jacobinism that made her vulnerable, but there is some indication that she or Stone may have been involved in spying. She documented the six months she spent in Switzerland in A Tour of Switzerland (1798), a book as much about politics as about travel. After the fall of Robespierre in the summer of 1794 Williams and Stone returned to Paris. In 1798 her sister died, and Williams adopted her two young nephews. Initially impressed by Napoleon, Williams later abhorred him. Her “Ode on the Peace of Amiens” (1801) offended the emperor, and as a result she and her family were briefly detained. The British government intercepted letters sent by Williams and Stone to Joseph Priestley and, in an effort to further discredit its critics, published them as Copies of Original Letters Recently Written by Persons in Paris to Dr. Priestley in America, Taken on Board of a Neutral Vessel (1798). That same year Richard Polwhele, in The Unsex'd Females, called Williams “an intemperate advocate for Gallic licentiousness.”⁹ Hester Lynch Piozzi referred to her as “a wicked little Democrate.”¹⁰ But her press was not all bad. The Critical Review for January 1796 observed of her Letters that if they

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 a variety of engaging anecdotes, expose the human heart.¹¹

Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic, Towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century in a Series of Letters (1801) picks up the narrative where A Tour in Switzerland left off. It includes “The History of Perourou; or, The Bellows-Mender, Written by Himself,” a comic tale about the breakdown of class barriers in which a laboring-class man is transformed into a gentleman and achieves domestic happiness in a bourgeois world. One of Williams's most popular stories, it was pirated in chapbooks in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, and in 1838 Edward Bulwer Lytton used it as the basis for his popular stage play, The Lady of Lyons. The New Annual Register for 1801 reprinted “On the State of Women in the French Republic,” a feminist treatise published within Sketches that calls for expanded rights for women and highlights their heroism in the Revolution and their intellectual abilities. Sketches provoked a strong but mixed response. The Critical Review acknowledged that Williams's “admirers are not confined to this island, nor indeed to this quarter of the globe,” but the Monthly Review faulted her for “too strong and too poetical colouring,” wrong information, borrowing from the work of others, and “an affectation of sentiment and sensibility.” The British Critic classed her among the “wretches,” the “abandoned shameless women,” from throughout Europe who were promoting “the views of France against their respective countries” in a revolutionary effort “subversive of the manners and morals of their native country.”¹² In 1802 Valentine Browne Lawless described Williams's salon, for many years an important institution in Parisian culture, as “chiefly composed of liberal republicans and anti-Bonapartists.”¹³

In 1803, mistakenly thinking the politically motivated forgeries of Louis XVI's letters were authentic, Williams edited them as The Political and Confidential Correspondence of Lewis the Sixteenth, adding her own republican commentary on each letter. British periodicals reviled her for this effort. A. F. Bertrand de Moleville published a book-length attack, translated into English by R. C. Dallas as A Refutation of the Libel on the Memory of the Late King of France, Published by Helen Maria Williams (1804). Williams and Stone toured Normandy in 1810, and she was saddened by the death of her mother two years later. The prosperous life the couple had been living came to a halt when Stone lost his money in a business speculation. Williams then became the family's main financial support. With the fall of Napoleon, British travelers flocked to Paris, and Williams's salon was one of the places where they gathered. Freed by the changed political landscape to resume her role as the foremost British commentator on French politics, in 1815 she published Narrative of Events Which have Taken place in France from the Landing of Napoleon Bonaparte. Reaction in Britain was mixed. The Quarterly Review evaluated a selection of books about Napoleon's “hundred days” and preferred Williams's to the rest, declaring that it was “written with accuracy, with a free and, we had almost said, an impartial spirit.” But the Monthly Review saw the book as impious, sentimental, and not real history and charged Williams with lax personal morals.¹⁴ In order to raise money, Williams also translated works by her friends Friedrich H. A. von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. She published a pamphlet, On the Late Persecution of the Protestants in the South of France (1816), to help avert calls for military intervention by Britain.

In 1817 Williams and Stone were struggling financially, and Henry Crabb Robinson asked the editor of the Times to give her work.¹⁵ Stone died in May 1818, and Williams was cheated out of what remained of their joint assets. A few years later Crabb Robinson remarked that she looked unhappy and ill. He helped her place her next book, Letters on the Events which have Passed in France, Since the Restoration in 1815 (1819). The Monthly Review found the book insightful, wished it were longer, and declared Williams “an original writer” who should not have to stoop to translating the work of others. The British Critic, however, said of her style, “She obviously can hardly write without the tears streaming down her cheeks; notes of admiration conclude every sentence; Oh!'s and Ah!'s choke her utterance before she can begin them.” It called her an “ex-jacobin” and said the book was full of nonsense and cant, derivative, and in “extremely bad taste.”¹⁶

The Charter, composed for her nephew, Athanase Laurent Charles Coquerel, on his wedding day, calls for egalitarian marriage. Williams went to live with the young couple in Amsterdam, where her nephew served as minister to a congregation of French Protestants. Williams's Poems on Various Subjects (1823), a collected and revised edition of her verse, received little notice. The Monthly Review thought her more recent poems inferior to earlier ones, admired the “force and elegance” of the book's introduction, but thought her verse generally inferior to her prose.¹⁷ Still, two of her devotional poems found their way into church hymn books—one beginning “My God! all nature owns thy sway, / Thou giv'st the night, and thou the day,” and another beginning

Whilst thee I see, protecting Power!
Be my vain wishes stilled;
And may this consecrated hour
With better hopes be filled.

William Wordsworth could recite from memory her sonnet “To Hope.”¹⁸

Williams's last work, another collection of political letters, Souvenirs de la révolution française (1827), was never published in English; it appeared only in Paris in her nephew's French translation. Williams died in Paris on 15 December 1827 and, as she had wished, was buried beside Stone in Père Lachaise cemetery. Looking back on her long career in 1823, Williams observed in the introduction to Poems on Various Subjects: “I have long renounced any attempts in verse, confining my pen almost entirely to sketches of the events of the Revolution. I have seen what I relate, and therefore I have written with confidence; I have there been treading on the territory of History, and a trace of my footsteps will perhaps be left. My narratives make a part of that marvellous story which the eighteenth century has to record to future times, and the testimony of a witness will be heard.”¹⁹

Notes

1. First published in European Magazine 6 (1784): 236-37.

2. Published under the pseudonym “Axiologus” in ibid., 7:202.

3. “Les impressions de cette journée memorable ont fixé pour toujours mes opinions politiques”, translated by Gary Kelly in Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827 (Oxford, 1993), 35.

4. Quoted in ibid., 35-36.

5. Letter of 24 December 1792, in Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, 1979), 226.

6. N.s., 18 (October 1796): 183.

7. Quoted in Todd, Dictionary.

8. Ibid.

9. The Unsex'd Females: A Poem (London, 1798), 19n.

10. Quoted in Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 77.

11. N.s., 16 (January 1796): 1.

12. Critical Review, n.s., 31 (February 1801): 183-84; Monthly Review, n.s., 35 (May 1801): 82-83; British Critic 17 (June 1801): 582-83.

13. Quoted in Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 200.

14. Quarterly Review 14 (October 1815): 69; Monthly Review, n.s., 78 (November 1815): 300-309.

15. Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London, 1938), 1:176, 182.

16. Monthly Review, n.s., 90 (September 1819): 32-36; British Critic, n.s., 12 (October 1819): 392-99.

17. N.s., 102 (September 1823): 20-23.

18. Helen Maria Williams, Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1823), 203n.

19. Ibid., ix-x.