词条 | Williams, Helen Maria |
释义 | Williams, Helen Maria English writer born 1762, London died Dec. 15, 1827, Paris English poet, novelist, and social critic best known for her support of such radical causes as abolitionism and the French Revolution. The daughter of an army officer, she was privately educated at Berwick-on-Tweed. After she went to London in 1781 to publish her poem Edwin and Eltruda, she made a wide literary acquaintance, which included Dr. Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns as well as such prominent radicals as Joseph Priestley and William Godwin. In the 1780s she achieved some success with her poetry; her collected poems (1786) had a subscription of some 1,500 names. ![]() On her travels Williams was accompanied by another English expatriate, John Hurford Stone. She wrote about her time in Switzerland in Tour in Switzerland (1798), which also includes some of her verse. Her hatred for Robespierre did not destroy her faith in the original principles of the Revolution, and after his fall (July 1794) she returned to Paris. Williams's enthusiasm for political change in France lost her most of her literary friends in England. Because of her disenchantment with the Directory, she initially admired Napoleon Bonaparte, but she later condemned him as a tyrant and finally welcomed his fall in her Narrative of the Events (1815). In the meantime she satirized rank and privilege in Perourou (1801) and reiterated her republican principles in an edition of the forged correspondence of Louis XVI (1803). In 1817 she took out letters of naturalization in France but spent most of the remaining decade of her life in Amsterdam. Her Poems on Various Subjects appeared in 1823. |
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