In her early review of Julia, a Novel Interspersed with Some Poetical Pieces, Mary Wollstonecraft succinctly summarizes key strengths of Helen Maria Williams's first and only novel: its radically feminine sensibility, its gracious social satire, and its moments of elevating spiritual sublimity. She also admires Williams for refining the dross of romantic clichés out of the novel of sentiment through her fine balance of rational, detached sense with emotional, particular sensibility. However, Wollstonecraft does not touch on the novel's decidedly democratic and revolutionary thrust, despite the date of her review and of Williams's novel, both published within a year of the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. The social satire of aristocratic cruelty within Julia's prose and the alternative vision presented by its ‘poetical pieces’, ranging in topic from moonlight contemplations in natural landscapes to the terrors of imprisonment in the Bastille, together form a trenchant political critique. This introduction will explore the interconnections between Williams's rhetoric of poetic sensibility, her construction of contemplative sublimity, and her attraction to revolutionary freedom.

Helen Maria Williams is today best known as the writer of political correspondence detailing the events of the French Revolution. Her Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790, To a Friend in England (1790) and Letters from France in eight volumes (1790–6) share her early passion for the revolution and her sorrow over the loss of Girondist friends at the Guillotine. Williams wrote in multiple genres, however, and like her heroine Julia, was very much a poet of sensibility, especially early on in her publishing career.