Helen Maria Williams (1761 or 1762 – 15 December 1827) was a British novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. A religious dissenter, she was a supporter of abolitionism and of the ideals of the French Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror, but nonetheless spent much of the rest of her life in France.
A controversial figure in her own time, the young Williams was favorably portrayed in a 1787 poem by William Wordsworth, but (especially at the height of the French Revolution) she was portrayed by other writers as irresponsibly politically radical and even as sexually wanton.
Famous quotes containing the words helen, maria and/or williams:
“I do wish you’d stop reading my mind.... It’s so frightfully disconcerting—like being followed up one’s trousers.”
—Abraham Polonsky, U.S. screenwriter, Frank Butler, and Helen Deutsch. Mitchell Leisen. Col. Deniston (Ray Milland)
“He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
“We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)