WILLIAMS, Helen Maria.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Letters containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, First editions of the four later volumes in Williams's revolutionary series, covering the Reign of Terror and its aftermath. This popular epistolary chronicle gained the author the appellation of "English historian of the French Revolution". These volumes were written after her return to Paris from exile in Switzerland. Published in over the course of six years and known collectively as "Letters from France" (1790-96), Williams's correspondence offers a detailed record and analysis of the Revolution. She "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). Williams was dually admired and maligned by her contemporaries. Her literary salon was attended by the likes of Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Francisco de Miranda. She was branded by Edmund Burke as one of the "clan of desperate, wicked, and mischievously ingenious women" who were publishing radicalizing, pro-revolutionary works at the turn of the century (Kennedy, p. 326).Volumes I, II, and III were also issued with variant title pages incorporating the French Republican calendar.

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