Helen Maria Williams

Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827) was an English poet, novelist and translator, brought up in Berwick-upon-Tweed and later in London. Her first poem, the legendary tale Edwin and Eltruda, appeared in 1782, and Peru, a Poem in Six Cantos followed in 1784, a lament for the fall of the Inca empire to the Spanish conquerors. Her two-volume Poems of 1786 was published by subscription.

A religious Dissenter, she supported the abolition of the slave trade and, from 1790, the ideals of the French Revolution, and she settled in France, where she wrote the Letters from France and was imprisoned for a time during the Terror. She died in Paris in 1827. Wordsworth printed his early sonnet to her in 1787. The poems held here are those of her Poems (1786); Peru stands as a separate work.