Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827)

by J. Singleton, pubd 1792 (after Ozias Humphry?)

private collection; photograph © National Portrait Gallery, London

Williams, Helen Maria (1759–1827), writer, was born in London on 17 June 1759, the daughter of Charles Williams (d. 1762), secretary to the island of Minorca, and his second wife, Helen, née Hay (1730–1812). Charles and Helen Williams were married in London in St Martin-in-the-Fields on 1 June 1758. They had two daughters, Cecilia (bap. 29 September 1760) and Helen Maria, who were both baptized at St James's Church, Piccadilly. Charles Williams was buried in St John's, Westminster, in December 1762, survived by his wife and two children, and a daughter from his first marriage, Persis Williams.

Along with her sister and half-sister, Williams was raised by her widowed mother in Berwick upon Tweed. In the summer of 1781 they returned to London, where Williams's literary talents were encouraged by their minister, Dr Andrew Kippis of Princes Street Presbyterian Church. Her first poem, Edwin and Eltruda, was published in 1782, and several other pieces followed, including the epic Peru (1784), and An Ode on the Peace (1783), which Samuel Johnson praised when they met in May 1784. Kippis introduced her to writers such as William Hayley and the Warton brothers, and about 1785 Williams became a correspondent of the poet Anna Seward and gained another mentor in Dr John Moore. The success of Williams's Poems (1786) secured her position as a prominent poet of sensibility and inspired several tributes, including the young William Wordsworth's first published work, 'Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress' (1787).

The British campaign against the slave trade contributed to the charged political atmosphere of the late 1780s, and several women published abolitionist poems, including Williams, who remained committed to the cause throughout her life. Kippis was also involved in the campaign to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, and guests at the Williams tea table included fellow dissenting writers such as Samuel Rogers, William Godwin, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. In 1789 the fall of the Bastille was widely celebrated, and Williams included a poem on the subject in her novel Julia (1790).

The French Revolution had a great impact on Williams's own life and literary career. She went to France in the summer of 1790, and her enthusiastic book about her travels, Letters Written in France (1790), would become the first of eight volumes of eyewitness accounts, later known as the Letters from France (1790–96). She explained in her first book that the historic Bastille day celebration in Paris was 'not a time in which distinctions of country were remembered. It was the triumph of human kind … and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world' (p. 14).

In September 1791 Williams returned to France for an extended stay, announcing her departure to her readers in a poem entitled A Farewell for Two Years to England, which the Analytical Review praised for its 'happy mixture of energy and tenderness', written 'on her favourite topic, liberty' (1791, 188). Almost a year later, her second volume of Letters from France was published during a brief visit to London.

When she went back to Paris in August 1792 Williams was shocked by the increase in violence, but she remained committed to the struggles of her Girondin friends including Madame Roland, Pierre Verginaud, and J. P. Brissot. To bolster their cause and inform the British public of the crisis in France, she wrote her next work, which covered events from 1792 until early May 1793, severely criticizing Robespierre and lamenting the execution of Louis XVI. The reign of terror meant that these two new volumes of Letters from France (1793) had to appear anonymously.

Since France was at war with England, in October 1793 British citizens in Paris were subject to arrest, and Williams, her sisters, and her mother were imprisoned for six weeks, first in the Luxembourg Palace and then in the convent Les Anglaises. In March 1794 Williams's sister Cecilia married a Frenchman, Martin A. Coquerel, and the family settled in Paris. However, it was dangerous for Williams to remain in France. In July 1794 she went into exile in Switzerland for six months, travelling with John Hurford Stone and Benjamin Vaughan, and under the protection of the family of Colonel Johann-Rudolf Frey in Basel. After returning to Paris she completed her second series of Letters from France (1795–6) on the reign of terror and its aftermath. The series earned her the appellation 'English historian of the French Revolution' (Coquerel, viii), but reviews were characteristically divided along party lines, with some finding her 'a misguided female' (British Critic, 1796, 210) and others a 'friend of liberty' (Critical Review, 1795, 361). One reviewer stated that her Letters from France 'will form a valuable, authentic, and entertaining history of the most astonishing event of modern times' (Critical Review, 1796, 7).

Meanwhile, rumours circulated in England about Williams's relationship with John Hurford Stone, an Englishman living in Paris whose wife had divorced him in 1794. There is no conclusive evidence about the relationship, though Williams wrote to her friends that her conduct was beyond reproach and that her family had given Stone a home during the storms of the revolution. He remained a permanent member of their household, and in the years that followed Stone and Coquerel (Williams's brother-in-law) joined in several different business ventures, from publishing to china manufacturing.

The late 1790s seemed a time of renewed hopes for political progress, as shown by Williams's Tour in Switzerland (1798), which anticipated the revolutionary activity in the Swiss cantons. Like many of her books, it was translated immediately into French. Optimistically calling the new century the 'age of rights' (2.216), Williams lauded the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte in her next book, Sketches of the French Republic (1801), a work that became known for its critique of Nelson's actions in Naples. The peace of Amiens allowed visitors once more into France, and many famous guests attended her salon or conversazione, including Tadeusz Kościuszko, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, Joel Barlow, Amelia Opie, Henri Grégoire, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, and Thomas Erskine. Catherine Wilmot wrote that Williams's

Hotel is in the midst of a delightful garden and we spend the evening in her Library, which was particularly corresponding with her style of society, the latter being compos'd of Senators, Members of the National Institute (in their blue embroider'd coats) and every one in the literary line.

Wilmot, 39

Williams became disillusioned with Bonaparte's policies, and her salon was for a time placed under police surveillance. In 1803 Napoleon forbade the sale of her edition of Louis XVI's correspondence, letters she had purchased which unknown to her had been forged. Although she was helped out of this predicament by Antoine Français de Nantes (1756–1836), an influential statesman, the political climate was such that she stopped publishing original works for several years. During the Napoleonic period domestic concerns occupied much of her time. Her sister Cecilia had died in 1798, and Williams became the adoptive mother of her two nephews Athanase (1795–1868) and Charles (1797–1851).

Williams had earlier had some success as a translator with her 1796 edition of Bernardin de St Pierre's work, as Paul and Virginia, and in 1810 she began to prepare an English edition of Alexander von Humboldt's major works on South America (published as Researches, 1814, and the seven-volume Personal Narrative, 1814–29). This marked the beginning of a long friendship with Humboldt.

When Napoleon abdicated in 1814, there was an influx of visitors to Paris, and Williams welcomed to her salon Thomas Clarkson and many others. Her literary career was renewed with the publication of her Narrative of the Hundred Days of 1815. She was naturalized as a French citizen in 1817, but the last decade of her life was a difficult one, with financial and personal losses. Her mother had died in 1812 and John Hurford Stone in 1818. Henry Crabb Robinson helped her to find a British publisher for her Letters (1819) on the French protestant church and on the Bourbon restoration.

Still maintaining a keen interest in current events, Williams knew young reformers like John Bowring, who regarded her as one of the literary celebrities of the French Revolution, and who arranged for the publication of her last book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects (1823). Her two nephews helped to support her in her advancing years, and in 1823 she left Paris to live with the eldest, Athanase Coquerel, now a protestant minister in Amsterdam, where later that year her half-sister Persis died. In May 1827 she sent Benjamin Constant a copy of her memoirs, Souvenirs de la révolution française, just published in a French translation by her nephew Charles Coquerel. That same year she moved back to Paris, where she died at rue neuve St Eustache on 15 December 1827. She was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.