SOURCE: Adams, M. Ray. “Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution.” In Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, pp. 87-117. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939.

In the following essay, Adams examines the manner in which Williams interpreted the events of the French Revolution for her reading public in England.

“The most sensible women,” wrote George Dyer in 1792, “are more uniformly on the side of liberty than the other sex; witness a Macaulay, a Wollstonecraft, a Barbauld, a Jebb, a Williams, and a Smith.”¹ The establishment of such a generalization perhaps requires a greater range of observation of the sex than George Dyer could boast, but the list of women radicals who were writing with more or less distinction during the revolutionary era is very striking. We might add to those whom Dyer mentions Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, Mrs...