Helena Wells is an early example of a transplanted American writer. During adolescence she went to England, where, during a ten-year period beginning in 1798, she completed and published two multivolume novels, a guidebook on the education of young females, and a treatise advocating social reform on behalf of destitute women. These four works reveal an author concerned about women's struggles to live decently in late-eighteenth-century England. Thematically, Wells focused on proper child rearing and education as the essential means of social reform and domestic happiness, the need to help "unportioned respectable females," rational management of one's financial resources, and behavior modeled on patience, modesty, humility, honesty, and faith. Although Wells's writings do not comment on the American Revolution in any significant way, the war and her family's attitudes toward it did contribute to the views expressed in her books.

Helena Wells's parents, Robert and Mary Wells, came to...