SOURCE: Fruchtman, Jr., Jack. “The Politics of Sensibility: Helen Maria Williams' Julia and the Terror in France. Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work, and Culture 1 (2001): 185-201.

In the following essay, Fruchtman summarizes Williams' novel Julia with reference to her influences and her eyewitness accounts of the French Revolution.

Helen Maria Williams's novel Julia (1790) possesses all the ingredients of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, or novel of sensibility. Julia tells the story of the unrequited love of Frederick Seymour for the young, strikingly beautiful Julia Clifford (Ellis 214-20; Ty 73-84). At first blush, Julia is intensely private and sensitive, often lost in her own world, her thoughts about life, her friends and relations, and the limited social world in which she inhabits. Because her sensibility is more profound than that of any woman in the novel, she deeply understands the power relationships, especially the problem of domination, that prevails...