Helen Maria Williams (1759-1827) was the daughter of Charles Williams, a Welsh army officer, and his wife Helen Hay. Her father died when she was eight and the family moved to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where she received a limited education. She moved to London in 1781. She was a religious Dissenter and a supporter of the movement to abolish the slave trade and of the ideals of the French Revolution. She published a volume of poems in 1786 and a novel, Julia, in 1790. She defied convention by travelling alone to revolutionary France, and published a book about her experiences there, entitled Letters written in France in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England (London, T Cadell), which was followed by Letters from France: containing many new anecdotes relative to the French Revolution, and the present state of French manners (London, G & J Robinson, 1792). She spent some time in prison during the Terror. She continued to write, publishing translations from French and German, and in 1819 brought out Letters on Events which have passed in France since the Restoration in 1815. She was attacked by conservative writers as a political radical and an “unsex’d female”.