Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Romantic belongings
- Chapter 2 Domesticating the sublime: Ann Radcliffe and Gothic dissent
- Chapter 3 Forgotten sentiments: Helen Maria Williams's ‘Letters from France’
- Chapter 4 Exiles and émigrés: the wanderings of Charlotte Smith
- Chapter 5 Mary Wollstonecraft and the national body
- Chapter 6 Patrician, populist and patriot: Hannah More's counter-revolutionary nationalism
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Chapter 3 - Forgotten sentiments: Helen Maria Williams's ‘Letters from France’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Romantic belongings
- Chapter 2 Domesticating the sublime: Ann Radcliffe and Gothic dissent
- Chapter 3 Forgotten sentiments: Helen Maria Williams's ‘Letters from France’
- Chapter 4 Exiles and émigrés: the wanderings of Charlotte Smith
- Chapter 5 Mary Wollstonecraft and the national body
- Chapter 6 Patrician, populist and patriot: Hannah More's counter-revolutionary nationalism
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
She wept. – Life's purple tide began to flow
In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Dim were my swimming eyes – my pulse beat slow
And my full heart was swelled to dear delicious pain.
In March 1787, The European Magazine published a Shakespearean sonnet by a pseudonymous poet, ‘Axiologus’, which was entitled ‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’. The poet was William Wordsworth; it was his first published poem, although it was not reproduced under his name during his lifetime. Some thirty-five years later, this formative moment of sonneteering seems to have dropped out of Wordsworth's memory, when, in a letter to Walter Savage Landor, he recalls his first foray into authorship and his early attempts at the sonnet. He records 1793 as the year ‘when I first became an author’, inspired not by the sentimental effusions of a ‘minor poetess’, but by a more sublime, masculine model:
Many years ago my sister happened to read to me the sonnets of Milton, which I could at that time repeat; but somehow or other I was singularly struck with the style of harmony, and the gravity, and republican austerity of those compositions. In the course of the same afternoon I produced 3 sonnets, and soon after many others; and since that time, and from want of resolution to take up anything of length, I have filled up many a moment in writing Sonnets, which, if I had never fallen into the practice, might easily have been better employed.
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- Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790sRomantic Belongings, pp. 48 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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