English poet, novelist, translator, salonnière, radical social critic, and proponent of such causes as the French Revolution and abolitionism. A first-hand witness to much of the French Revolution, Williams published her account of events in a series of letters beginning with Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790 (1790), followed by four more volumes of Letters from France (1792-1796). Other works of note include Edwin and Eltruda: a Legendary Tale (1782), An Ode on the Peace (1783), Peru (1784), Collected Poems (1786), her Poem on the Slave Bill (1788), Julia (1790), another collected volume of Poems in 1791, A Tour of Switzerland (1798), Perourou, the Bellows-Mender (1801), Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic (1801), Narrative of the Events which have Taken Place in France from the Landing of Napoleon Bonaparte ... to the Restoration of Louis XVIII (1815), Letters on the Events which have Passed in France since the Restoration (1819), and Poems on Various Subjects (1823). Although she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror, Williams spent much of her life in France.