SOURCE: Kelly, Gary. “Helen Maria Williams in Post-Revolutionary France.” In Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827, pp. 192-233. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Kelly examines the post-Revolutionary writings of Williams and the rhetorical technique by which she hoped to feminize the Age of Bonaparte and its aftermath just as she had done with the Revolution itself.

In the late 1790s Helen Maria Williams was secure and well off in Paris, at the centre of intellectual, literary, and political life. Despite continuing war with Britain, Bonaparte's military victories and overthrow of the Directory seemed to stabilize the Revolution at last, apparently guaranteeing the values of feminized civil society that Williams claimed to be the ‘true’ character of the Revolution, and she argues this view for British readers in Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic, Towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, in...