WILLIAMS, Helen Maria.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Letters written in France, The first four volumes in Williams's celebrated eight-volume eyewitness account of the French Revolution, all first editions except volume I, which is the second edition, published the year after the first. This popular epistolary series gained the author the appellation of "English historian of the French Revolution".Published in separate volumes over the course of six years and known collectively as "Letters from France" (1790-96), Williams's correspondence offers a detailed report and analysis of the Revolution, as well as of its development and aftermath. The author "encases the political within the personal, sharing her feelings with her readers, recording, for instance the sense of exhilarating internationalist triumph provoked by early events in the revolution, seen as the 'triumph of human kind'... Williams notes the importance of women in the Revolution, mostly behind the scenes" (Orlando). The books were received with positive reviews and "became an important source of information for the British reading public", championed by its contemporaries as a "unique and valuable work whose epistolary style and appeal to pathos set it apart - in a positive sense - from standard history" (Kennedy, pp. 317-18). The first volume is an engaging travel narrative which begins at a mass at Notre Dame on the eve of the Fête de la Fédération and recounts visits to the ruins of the Bastille, the National Assembly, and the Palace of Versailles. The book endor

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