Williams, Helen Maria

Helen's parents were a Welsh officer and a Scottish mother . Received home education. From youth, she was keenly interested in politics.

Under the leadership of Andrew Kippis, who had a great influence on her literary career and political views, she contacted the leading representatives of the London intelligentsia of her time.

A religious dissident , she was a supporter of the abolition of abolitionism and the ideals of the French Revolution . In 19791 she went alone to revolutionary France. After the September reprisals, she joined the Girondins and moved to Paris , where she was mainly engaged in the epistolary genre , wrote prose and poetry.

She was the mistress of the salon , whose guests, among others, were Mary Wollstonecraft , Francisco Miranda , Thomas Payne .

After the fall of the Gironde, the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship and terror, she and her family were thrown into prison, where she was allowed to continue working on translating French works into English , including the translation of the popular novel by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre " Paul and Virginie ."

In the end, Williams was released from prison and after some time fled to Switzerland . Hatred of Robespierre did not destroy her faith in the original ideals of the revolution, and after his fall (July 1794), Williams returned to Paris .

She continued to write until Napoleon ordered her arrest in 1802 for the poem Ode on the Peace of Amiens.

After the restoration of the Bourbons in 1818, she became a naturalized citizen of France. In 1819 she moved to Amsterdam . However, she soon returned to Paris, where until her death in 1827 she continued to be a prominent translator of the works of French intellectuals for the English-speaking world.

She was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery .

She began publishing her poems and essays with the help of her mentor, Dr. Andrew Kippis. One of Williams' first political work, An Ode on the Peace, marked the end of the American Revolution . In 1784, under the direction of Kippis, Williams wrote a poem in six songs “Peru”, which details the results of Spanish colonialism in relation to the indigenous peoples of South America . Her next collection, “Poems,” published in 1786, demonstrated the ability of the poetess as a social critic and advocate of female sensitivity; in his poems, Williams fiercely opposed war, slavery, religion, and Spanish colonial practice. Roman Williams, supporting the French Revolution, Julia, was published in 1790.

Alarmed by Napoleon's imperial ambitions, Williams stopped writing. However, in 1815, she resumed her literary career, wrote poetry, letters, essays, short stories, and translated until her death.

• Lettre , A Rouen: De l'imprimerie de P. Seyer & Behourt, 1791.
• Nouveau voyage en Suisse , Paris: Charles Pougens ..., 1798.
• Aperçu de l'état des mœurs et des opinions dans la République Française: vers la fin du XVIII siècle , Paris: Chez les Frères Levrault, 1801.
• The history of Perourou, the bellows-mender with other amusing and instructive histories. Baltimore Md. : Printed for G. Douglas, 1802.
• Correspondance politique et confidentielle inédite de Louis XVI, avec ses frères, et plusieurs personnes célèbres, pendant les dernières années de son règne, et jusqu'à sa mort , Paris, Debray, an XI, 1803.
• Poems on various subjects with introductory remarks on the present state of science and literature in France , London: WB Whittaker, 1823.
• Souvenirs de la Révolution française , Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1827.

• Biography
• Helen maria williams