SOURCE: LeBlanc, Jacqueline. “Politics and Commercial Sensibility in Helen Maria Williams' Letters from France.” Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 1 (February 1997): 26-39.

In the following essay, LeBlanc explores the radical nature of Letters from France, claiming that the connection Williams makes between revolution and commerce differs from the writings of others sympathetic to the French Revolution, who tend to ignore that relationship.

Helen Maria Williams has rightfully taken her place in the newly formed canon of British women writers, most notably as a correspondent from revolutionary France. A popular poet and sentimental novelist of the late eighteenth century who used her verse to speak out on the oppressions of war, the slave trade, and colonialism, Williams traveled to France in July 1790 and began a series of letters to an imaginary friend in support of the Revolution.¹ A dramatic tour of French life and politics, Williams' Letters From France is a cross...