SOURCE: Kennedy, Deborah. “Benevolent Historian: Helen Maria Williams and Her British Readers.” In Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, edited by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Kokke, pp. 317-330. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Kennedy considers how Williams successfully negotiated the cultural and political minefield she entered as a liberal female historian.

Traditionally, the areas of politics and history have not been regarded as a woman's proper sphere of study or activity. If, even in the twentieth century, as Joan Wallach Scott has observed, the involvement of women in those fields has been problematic, then how much more so was that the case for women in the late eighteenth century,¹ when Catharine Macaulay was the only female historian of stature,² and Angelica Kauffman perplexed critics by surpassing her male contemporaries in the genre of history painting.³ What, then, did...