Helen of War: Epistles of the French Revolution

Helen Maria Williams was a woman ahead of her time. While writing letters home to England during the French Revolution, the turmoil and political upheaval around her closely mimicked the turmoil she was experiencing personally. An outcast amongst her friends, Williams’ observations and desolation are apparent in her Letters Written in France, in the Summer of 1790, a collection of her writings to friends and family still in England. As a woman effectively on the front lines of war, Williams was able to capture the reality of the revolution and record her observations in Letters, the accepted writing medium of women. Romanticism was an intellectual movement which began around the latter half of the 18th century and is was defined mostly by change. Most arts, like music, poetry, literature, and even politics began to adapt in response to the turbulent social climate seen in France during the Revolution. Romanticism emphasized emotion, imagination, and originality, which was in stark contrast to the science, reason and order defined by the “Age of Enlightenment” which came after the Revolution. Romanticism, as opposed to Enlightenment, concentrated more on the individual writer or artist themselves, as opposed to the state or reason. Both visual arts and literature, from the Romanticism movement, elevated and celebrated Nature as a wild Being, rather than as something that can easily be explained reason or study. The Romanticism movement in literature evolved in response to the French Revolution and rather than focus on reason and rationality to explain nature and man, Romanticism focused more on emotions and feelings to explain and portray them. The poetry and Letters of Helen Maria Williams espouse the Romanticism ideals as they po...

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...thin her Letters has assured Williams a place in feminist study, regardless if that was her original intent. Williams personifies all the ideals of Romanticism within herself and her writings—emotional appeal to trepidation, horror and awe—and the sublimity of untamed nature.

Works Cited

Adams, Ray M. "Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution," in Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1939), p. 114.

Blakemore, Steven. "Revolution and the French Disease: Laetitia Matilda Hawkins's Letters to Helen Maria Williams." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36.3 (1996): 673-91. JSTOR. Web. 18 Feb. 2011.

Williams, Helen M. "Letters From France." The Longman Anthology of British Literature. By Susan J. Wolfson. Third ed. Vol. 2A. New York [u.a.: Longman, 2006. 97-100.