"The cause of liberty still warms my bosom": Helen Maria Williams and the Political History of the French Revolution

British poet and writer Helen Maria Williams (1759-1827) was a celebrated author in the eighteenth century literary circles whose work was praised by figures such as Elizabeth Montagu, Joseph Priestley, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Anna Seward or William Wordsworth. Her most acclaimed work Letters Written in France (1790-1796) was the result of her first visit to Paris. As a result of her engagement with the cause of the French Revolution, she settled permanently in Paris in 1792, where she got acquainted with British radicals such as Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft. Williams maintained her commitment to the political ideas that emerged during the Enlightenment throughout all her literary career. In an increasingly anti-revolutionary environment in Britain and after more than a decade without producing a work on politics, Williams resumed her political interests in order to defend the political and philosophical ideas of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, with twenty years spent away from her native land, her expatriate status singled her out as an unconventional female intellectual. My main objective is to analyse how Williams articulates her political argument in this new context by answering the following questions:  how is her subject position shaped? as a participant or as an outsider in the political debates of her time? Finally, how has the latter inflected her political discourse since her earlier work Letters Written in France (1790)?