‘The Good Will Remain Written in Brass’

Abstract

In the course of her career, Helen Maria Williams undertook multiple experiments with life writing including epistolary histories, travelogues, character sketches, biographies, obituaries, and editions of letters. The scope and diversity of her work highlights the fluidity of life writing forms and their potential for women writers engaged in historical and political narration. Williams’ eye-witness accounts of events in France, from the early days of the French Revolution to the aftermath of the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, consist of thirteen volumes covering the period 1790 to 1819. Her writing is characterised by a feeling and intimate response to revolutionary events, but she avoids scandalous self-revelation in favour of a personalised social history in which she memorialises the experiences of a generation. Friendships were central to her life writing in her commitment to the dialogic form of the letter and the language of sensibility, the sympathetic narration of the lives of others, and the inclusion of historical insights by collaborators. Writing in medias res, Williams’ self-representation changed radically in response to political events from the visual spectacles and sentimental narratives of the early volumes of the Letters from France (1790–1796) to the increasing emphasis on collective memories, posterity, and the historical record in her later works.