ABSTRACT
Helen Maria Williams and Charlotte Smith provide particularly useful examples of the development of radical sensibility during the 1790s. Both had established reputations as poets before the French Revolution and Charlotte Smith had produced her popular first novel Emmeline. Both writers welcomed the French Revolution and suffered criticism for maintaining their loyalty to its ideals. When Williams moved her family and her salon to Paris she turned from poetry and the novel to the letter form. She exemplified the radical faith in individual experience reacting to the events of the moment, her letters being based on her own personal involvement and that of her friends with the moving spirits and horrific events of France in the 1790s. Her reaction to Burke had the advantage of meeting him on his own ground within the polarizing aspects of sensibility. The letters of 1793 are far less optimistic and show her bewilderment at the course of the Revolution.
