Helen Maria Williams

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Helen Maria Williams (born June 17, 1759 in London , † December 15, 1827 in Paris ) was a British writer , poet and translator of French-language works.

Helen Maria Williams (1816)

Life

Helen Maria Williams was from London and was (probably) born in 1762. Her parents were the Welsh Army Officer Charles Williams and Helen Hay, who came from Scotland. After her father's early death, the family moved to Berwick-upon-Tweed , where Helen was tutored by her mother. From 1781 Williams lived in London, where her mother and sister later followed. In London she met the poet Andrew Kippis , who introduced her to the leading intellectuals of the time.

With Kippi's help, Helen was able to publish her first poem, the romance Edwin and Eltruda, A Legendary Tale , in 1782 . In the following years Ode on the Peace (1783) and Peru (1784), a historical poem about the exploitation of South America from Europe, appeared. Williams' two-volume Collected Poems from 1786 found considerable sales. A year later she brought out another poem on an explosive topic with the Poem on the Slave Bill . Your attitude to the slave question influenced u. a. the works of Hannah More and Ann Yearsley .

At the end of the century, Helen Maria moved primarily in politically active, radical circles and was considered an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. In her Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790 she describes, among other things, the annual celebrations on the occasion of the storming of the Bastille. From 1791/92 on she lived exclusively on French soil. William Wordsworth , who at that time still shared the enthusiasm for the revolution, sought a meeting with the poet, but this did not materialize.

In the nineties, Williams mainly published prose, particularly other volumes of the Letters from France . While in prison imposed by Robespierre (1793), she translated St. Pierre's work Paul et Virginie (1796). After her release, she lived with the divorced John Hurford Jones. The experiences during a six-month stay in Switzerland (1794) describes her two-volume tour in Switzerland from 1798.

Many of her English friends turned away from Helen Maria, not least because she supported the "wild anarchy" in France (so judged Boswell , who mentions her in his Life of Johnson ). Williams published other prose works, later her Poems on Various Subjects (1823).

She lived in Amsterdam for a few years and died in Paris in 1827.

Works

  • Edwin and Eltruda. A legendary tale (1782)
  • Ode on the Peace (1783)
  • Peru (1784), a poem in six cantos
  • The Bastille. A vision (1790)
  • Julia (1790), a novel

literature

  • Deborah Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution (Bucknell University Press, 2002).
  • Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry on Helen Maria Williams on georgianera.wordpress.com
  2. ^ Entry on Helen Maria Williams on authorandbookinfo.com
personal data
SURNAME Williams, Helen Maria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1759
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH December 15, 1827
Place of death Paris