W illiams, H elen M aria, Prose

Abstract

Born in 1761, Helen Maria Williams emerged in the 1780s as a poet of sensibility and liberal political commitments; her trenchant poetry and involvement in the Portman Square literary salon allowed her star to rise quickly. In 1790, on the invitation of her acquaintance Augustin du Fossé, she visited Paris to celebrate the Fête de la Fédération and there found, in the sublime spectacle of the ongoing French Revolution, what would become her major subject thenceforth. A masterpiece of creative non‐fiction, her Letters Written in France, In the Summer 1790 offers enthusiastic support for the Revolution and imagines, through a subversive reworking of Burkean aesthetic and political theory, a transformative spirit of liberty emerging beautifully out of the sublime ruins of the Bastille. Williams's Letters were among the first eyewitness accounts of the French Revolution available in Britain, and the first two volumes sold briskly, requiring five printings within six years. When the Revolution proceeded into the Reign of Terror, Williams remained committed to the cause of liberty but adopted a more moderate Girondist perspective for the subsequent volumes of her Letters; these writings would bring her and her partner under police surveillance in 1793 and force them to leave France for a while. Between 1790 and 1796, Williams published eight volumes on the political situation in France; further observations followed in 1815 and 1819. In addition to her writings on the Revolution and its aftermath, Williams, interested as she was in becoming ‘a citizen of the world’, produced several works concerning travel across national borders: these include the novel Julia (1790), a narrative of her travels in Switzerland (1798), and translations of the writings of the explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1814–15). Williams can be considered a major writer of cosmopolitan prose (Craciun 2005), although she was equally capable of invoking English nationalism when it was politically expedient, as in her poem A Farewell, for Two Years, to England (1791). Perhaps the most complex statement of Williams's cosmopolitanism was her unorthodox translation of Bernardin de St Pierre's novella Paul et Virginie , which would become the most reprinted of her works in her lifetime and her most readily identifiable work across the nineteenth century (Favret 1993: 56). The Humboldt translations aside, she wrote little between 1803 and 1815. She died in Paris in 1829, having long hosted a prominent literary salon there, and having become a naturalized French citizen in 1818.