Page "Helen Maria Williams" Paragraph 6

In the context of the Revolution Controversy, she came down on the side of the revolutionaries in her 1790 novel Julia and defied convention by traveling alone to revolutionary France, where she was hosted by Mme.

Du Fossé, who had earlier, in London, given her lessons in French.

Her letters from France marked a turn from being primarily a writer of poetry to one of prose.

She enthusiastically attended the Fête de la Fédération on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and returning briefly to London in 1791 was a staunch, though not completely uncritical, defender of the Revolution.

Returning to France in July 1791, she published a poem " A Farewell for two Years to England "; in fact she briefly visited England again in 1792, but only to persuade her mother and her sisters, Cecilia and Persis, to join her in France just as the country was moving toward the more violent phases of its revolution.