Helen Maria Williams

I’ve heard the term Romanticism, but was never sure of its meaning. The Podcast provided good background and understanding of what was transpiring during this period when it was out with the old norms of aristocratic social domination and in with a new awakening of individualized thought, freedom, and power.

In reading Helen Maria Williams’ letters, I was first surprised by the fact that she was living in France by herself during a time when it was not customary for women to be self-reliant. Williams’ enthusiastic depiction of the Festival of the Federation points out that the significance of the event was not due as much to the event itself, but to the effect it had on the people. She is so overwhelmed by “the most sublime spectacle which, perhaps, was ever represented on the theatre of this earth” that she portrays it as “not to be described!” Nonetheless, she describes it quite eloquently and with intense passion.

Williams’ stirring narrative of her visit to the Bastille described the unlit dungeons “too low to admit of our standing upright” and she chronicled the cells so vividly that I could almost smell what she was describing. Her disdain for the tyrannical government responsible for these shocking conditions is unequivocal when she writes “If the splendour of a despotic throne can only shine like the radiance of lightning, while all around is involved in gloom and horror, in the name of heaven let its baleful luster be extinguished for ever”.

Williams offered praise to French women who had given up their jewels and titles in the name patriotism and compared them to the women of ancient Rome. She applauded their contribution to the Revolution, and I particularly liked her analogy that women are “those secret springs in mechanism, by which, though invisible, great movements are regulated.”

In her letter about the execution of Lewis XVI, Williams goes into graphic detail and provides insight into the mind of the king in the moments before he was beheaded. I was not familiar with Helen Maria Williams before I read her letters, but I was very inspired by her masterful command of language and prose.