Born in London, dad Charles had the enviable job of secretary
to the island of Minorca, mum Helen, née Hay, being his second wife; but then
he died and she was brought up, alongside a sister and a step-sister, in
Berwick-upon-Tweed, home-schooled because they didn’t have girls’ schools in
those days, but also mentored, by one Dr. Andrew Kippis, and
it was he who encouraged her to write, and then helped her publish her poetry and her essays
while she was still in her teens, "Edwin and Eltruda" the first in 1782.
Where she got the radical politics is unknown, but get it she did, religious dissent, abolitionism, detestation of imperialism and monarchism, all of it spelled out (or mis-spelled at this website) in two poems of 1784, “An Ode on the Peace”, celebrating the successful ending of the American Revolution, and the much longer “Peru”, exploring the consequences of Spanish colonialism on the indigenous peoples of South America. But that was just testing the waters. The 2-volume "Poems" of 1786 (click here to read them) advocated for women's expression of their femininity, not just their rights, was passionate in its opposition to war, slavery and religion, and added social criticism of exactly the sort Jane Austen would favour in her novels, and no coincidence that one of the poems in the collection is entitled "To Sensibility" - so a source of inspiration to a second of our GCSE curriculum hall-of-famers.
Living in London again by this time, she found herself pursued, intellectually at least, by Samuel Johnson and the Warton brothers, excahnging regular letters with Anna Seward, and encouraged to take up the abolitionist cause by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Williams contributing her poem "On the Bill which was Passed in England for Regulating the Slave-Trade" in 1788.
Then "“Julia”, her novel supporting the French
Revolution, in 1790 - you can see why I am struggling over where to place her
among the themes, and even more why I am unable to understand her total
absence, ever, from any school or under-graduate curriculum.
"Julia", or rather the French
Revolution itself, changed everything, determining the remainder of her adult
and her literary life. She paid a visit to Paris in 1790, and quickly became a
chronicler of the crisis in France for a British audience, her "Letters
from France (1790-6)" providing an eye-witness account of the
revolutionary struggles, and the Reign of Terror, and its aftermath; to all
intents and purposes, and both applied entirely consciously in her case, her letters
as much as her prose made her Britain’s first female War Correspondent. When
her sister Cecilia married a Parisian, Martin Coquerel, and moved there in
1794, Helen followed, allying herself with the
Girondists - which of course got her thrown into a Luxembourg prison on Robespierre’s orders during the Reign of Terror, though she was allowed to write sonnets there, and to work on a series of English translations of French literature, most notably Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel “Paul et Virginie”.
Finally released from prison, she took refuge in Switzerland until it was “safe” to return to Paris. “Safe” in quotation marks, because “safe” is a relative term. The Peace of Amiens was signed in 1801, while she was hostessing the French and British literary elite at her salon, entertaining such philosophers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Francisco de Miranda, and Thomas Paine. If Robbespierre hadn’t liked her for being a Girondin, Napoléon was simply infuriated by her 1802 poem “Ode on the Peace of Amiens” (similar title to the 1783 poem, rather less joyful feelings about it however), and had her locked up again.
And this time silence, for more than a decade, until the
world was rid of both Robespierre and
Napoléon, but not, alas, of either
slavery or world-conquering imperialism. Her literary career resumed in 1815
with poems, letters, sketches, some short fiction, and still more translations,
including the works of German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, with whom she
had become firm friends. She was naturalised as a French citizen in 1817. A
final collection of her "Poems on Various Subjects" was published in
1823, and she went on writing, right up until the day when she passed into that
area of English Literature where those not selected for Immortality must go,
the underworld of Oblivion, in Paris in 1827.
Amber pages
John Wesley, English clergyman and founder of Methodism, born today in 1703
A waterproof fabric for raincoats patented, today in 1823, by one Charles Mackintosh - I have added his name alongside Amelia Bloomer and Joseph Hansom and several others, on May 26
Arrest warrant issued, today in 1871, for Victoire Léodile Malon, or Béra on her birth certificate, though she was known to the world for having adopted both of her twin-sons from her first marriage (to Grégoire Champseix) as her pseudonym: André Léo. She fled, to Switzerland, where she had already spent twelve years, exiled there after the 1848 revolution, allowed back in 1860. Since when she had been the principal organiser of "La Société pour la Revendication des Droits de la Femme" ("the Society for the Claiming of the Rights of Women"), and then a central figure in the Paris Commune. The Commune was crushed at the end of May. She probably expected the warrant and was already packed.
Last death by guillotine, in public, in France, today in 1939. The "victim" was one Eugène Weidmann - a German by birth, despite the French firstname - though the real victims were his numerous kidnappees and murderees, including the dancer Jean de Koven, an American socialite... the list goes on for twenty years, starting in Germany, and ends here
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