Helen Maria Williams

Helen Maria Williams was a British novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. A religious dissenter, she was a supporter of abolitionism and of the ideals of the French Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror, but nonetheless spent much of the rest of her life in France. A controversial figure in her own time, the young Williams was favorably portrayed in a 1787 poem by William Wordsworth, but she was portrayed by other writers as irresponsibly politically radical and even as sexually wanton. She was born to a Scottish mother, Helen Hay, and a Welsh... army officer father, Charles Williams. Sources variously give her birth as 1761 or 1762. Her father died when she was eight; the remnant of the family moved to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where she had what she herself would describe in the preface to a 1786 book of poems as "a confined education" Archived 14 May 2005 at the Wayback Machine.
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