CRASSH

Feminist writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often drew analogies between the status of women in society and the lot of indigenous communities and African slaves in the European colonies. Their arguments took inspiration from the discourses of the French Revolution, which rejected literal and metaphorical enslavement on the ground that human beings share certain universal rights. A life-long supporter of the Revolution, Helen Maria Williams also criticised colonial tyranny and the oppression of women, drawing on a sentimental discourse indebted to the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his admirer J.-H. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Her footnotes to Peru (1784) and preface to her translation of Humboldt's Personal Narrative (1814-29) suggest that she saw herself as a legatee of Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes, but critics have overlooked the effect of her interest in 'New World' literature on her highly influential free translation of Bernardin's Paul et Virginie. Focussing on the character of Virginia and her response to slavery, this paper will argue that, by ventriloquising Bernardin's characters and interpolating sonnets into his narrative, Williams links his lament on slavery to her Revolutionary feminist convictions and expatriate experiences. I will go on to analyse the impact of Williams's translation on the work of the Anglo-Irish writer, Maria Edgeworth, whose cosmopolitan ambivalence towards colonialism owes much to the universal rights discourse of the Revolution. In her novel Belinda (1801), Edgeworth comments on Paul and Virginia in her portraits of the Creole Mr Vincent, his black servant Juba, and the ignorant Virginia St Pierre. In doing so, she not only satirises Bernardin's Rousseauvian lauding of female ignorance, but also argues - subtly but radically - for the validity and naturalness of female desire.