Helen Maria Williams

Helen Maria Williams published several works in the 1780s, including Edwin and Eltruda (1782), “An Ode on the Peace” (1783), Peru (1784), and Poems (1786). She was living in London at the time, having come under the influence of Dr. Andrew Kippis (1725-95), a prominent Dissenting minister. She moved to Paris in 1788, and, except for a brief return to England in 1792, remained in France and Europe the rest of her life, making a name for herself as a political writer. Her Letters written in France (1790-96) brought her considerable attention by providing English readers with a sympathetic eyewitness account of the French Revolution (Flower published an excerpt from the Letters in the CambridgeIntelligencer, January 4, 1794). John Hurford Stone, who also went to France shortly after the Revolution, became an intimate friend of Williams. Though a married man, he accompanied Williams’s on her travels in Switzerland in late 1794; at that time, she had been forced to flee France for fear of reprisals upon her by Robespierre (she would later record this experience in her Tour of Switzerland [1798]). J. H. Stone was accused of treason and tried in absentia in 1798. He and Williams would live together until his death in 1818. In her later years, Williams lived with her nephew, a congregationalist minister, in Amsterdam. She died in Paris on December 15, 1827, and was buried beside Stone in Pere-Lachaise.  In addition to Williams’s works in verse, she also wrote novels such as Julia (1790) and Perourou, the Bellows-Mender (1801). She also translated many French works into English, but she was best known for her political writings, especially her ardent support of revolutionary and republican ideals.  For more on Williams, see Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 38-55.