SOURCE: Bray, Matthew. “Helen Maria Williams and Edmund Burke: Radical Critique and Complicity.” Eighteenth-Century Life 16, no. 2 (May 1992): 1-20.

In the following essay, Bray explores the contradictions in Letters Written in France, contending that although most critics concentrate on its similarity to the sentimental novel, the work is more heavily influenced by its author's association with English dissenters and was written as a response to Edmund Burke's condemnation of the French Revolution.

As several critics point out, Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790¹—Helen Maria Williams' eyewitness, epistolary account of revolutionary France during the euphoric months following the Fête de la Fédération—is a work containing pronounced contradictions. Although it celebrates the Revolution's transformative effects, Letters Written in France tends to advocate a “noble equality” of sentiment² which preserves intact the class hierarchy and the subordinate status of women that existed before the Revolution...