Helen Maria Williams | |
|---|---|
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| Born | (1759-06-17)17 June 1759 London, England |
| Died | 15 December 1827(1827-12-15) (aged 68) Paris, France |
| Resting place | Père Lachaise Cemetery |
| Occupation | novelist,poet,memoirist,reporter |
Helen Maria Williams (17 June 1759 – 15 December 1827[1]) was a British novelist, poet, and translator ofFrench-language works. A religiousdissenter, she was a supporter ofabolitionism and of the ideals of theFrench Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during theReign of Terror and spent much of the rest of her life in France. A controversial figure in her own time, the young Williams was favourably portrayed in a 1787 poem byWilliam Wordsworth.[2]
She was born on 17 June 1759 in London to aScottish mother, Helen Hay, and aWelsh army officer father, Charles Williams.[1] She had an older sister, Cecilia (baptized 1760),[1] and an older half-sister Persis from her father's first marriage (born 1743).[3] Her father died in December 1762 when she was two.[1] He had previously served as Secretary forMinorca when it was a British possession, and accumulated enough personal property that his widow and daughters lived comfortably on the income from his estate and pension.[3] They moved toBerwick-upon-Tweed.[1] Williams later described herself as coming from a "family of women", growing up with only her mother and sisters.[3] Williams described her upbringing in the preface to a 1786 book of poems as "a confined education."[4]
In 1781, the Williams family moved to London,[5] where Williams metAndrew Kippis, who would have great influence on her literary career and political views and brought her into contact with the leading London intellectuals of her time.
Her 1786Poems touch on topics ranging from religion to a critique ofSpanish colonial practices. She allied herself with the cult of femininesensibility, deploying it politically inopposition to war ("Ode on the Peace," a 1786 poemabout Peru) and slavery (theabolitionist "Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade," 1788).
In the context of theRevolution Controversy, she came down on the side of the revolutionaries in her 1790 novelJulia and defied convention by travelling alone to revolutionary France, where she was hosted by Mme. Du Fossé, who had earlier, in London, given her lessons in French. HerLetters Written In France marked a turn from being primarily a writer of poetry to one of prose. She enthusiastically attended theFête de la Fédération on the anniversary of thestorming of the Bastille and returning briefly to London in 1791 was a staunch, though not completely uncritical, defender of the Revolution. Returning to France in July 1791, she published a poem "A Farewell for two Years to England"; in fact she briefly visited England again in 1792, but only to persuade her mother and her sisters, Cecilia and Persis, to join her in France just as the country was moving toward the more violent phases of its revolution.
After theSeptember Massacres of 1792, she allied herself with theGirondists; as asaloniere, she also hostedMary Wollstonecraft,Francisco de Miranda andThomas Paine. After the violent downfall of the Gironde and the rise of the Reign of Terror, she and her family were thrown into the Luxembourg prison where she was allowed to continue working on translations of French-language works into English, including what would prove to be a popular translation ofBernardin St. Pierre's novelPaul et Virginie, to which she appended her own prisonsonnets. Upon her release, she travelled withJohn Hurford Stone to Switzerland. She was harshly criticised for this since Stone, separated from an unfaithful wife, was still legally a married man; the subsequent history of Williams and Stone's relationship only tended to confirm the rumours. Nonetheless, her few poems from this period continue to express Dissenting piety and were published in volumes with those of other religiously like-minded poets. In 1798, she publishedA Tour in Switzerland, which included an account of her travels, political commentary, and the poem "A Hymn Written Amongst the Alps."
Williams' 1801Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic showed a continued attachment to the original ideals of the French Revolution but a growing disenchantment with the rise ofNapoleon; as emperor, he would declare her ode "The Peace signed between the French and the English" (also known as the "Ode on the Peace of Amiens") to be treasonable to France. Nonetheless, he proved to be, in this respect, more lenient than the revolutionary government had been to this now-famous international literary figure: she spent a single day in prison and continued to live and write in Paris. After theBourbon Restoration, she became anaturalised French citizen in 1818; nonetheless, in 1819 she moved toAmsterdam to live withAthanase Laurent Charles Coquerel, a nephew she had helped raise. However, she was unhappy in Amsterdam and soon returned to Paris, where, until her death in 1827, she continued to be an important interpreter of French intellectual currents for the English-speaking world.
Williams' works consist of poetry, novels, volumes of letters, and translations. The lines are not always clear, as she might include an original poem in the preface of another work, even in a translation of someone else's work.
