Julia

by Helen Maria Williams, Natasha Duquette (Editor)

This critical edition of Julia is the first modern printing of a novel that blends the character development of a poet with critical reflections on social injustice.

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1790

About the author

Helen Maria Williams (1761 or 1762 - 1827) was a English novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. She was an abolitionist, religious dissenter and supported of the French Revolution. Her 1786 Poems touch on topics ranging from religion to a critique of Spanish colonial practices. She allied herself with the cult of feminine sensibility, deploying it politically in opposition to war ("Ode on the Peace," a 1786 poem about Peru) and slavery (the abolitionist "Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade," 1788)."

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Helen Maria Williams is best known as a political writer, whose Letters Written in France captured all the chaos and excitement of Revolutionary Paris firsthand. But before she left England, she also wrote this, her only novel (I think). It's a bit stodgy for modern tastes, but it does have some interesting flourishes of social commentary and democratic enthusiasm.

Julia is basically a novel of sensibility, in which the eponymous heroine battles a passion for the husband of her best friend. He quite fancies her, too; but neither of them would ever do anything to hurt his wife, and so the book is full of a lot of frenzied expostulations, meaningful glances across card tables, and mournful wandering amidst Gothic ruins (while servants hold your parasol). This is one of those novels where people say things like, ‘Oh may every felicity attend you! – May you be happy, when the grave shall have covered my despair, and my heart shall retain no longer those sensations, which are interwoven with my existence.’

Balancing out such melodramatic apostrophes is a strain of welcome social comedy, as Williams pokes fun at the tonish set of late eighteenth-century London, whose transitory pleasures revolve around fashion, hairstyles, popular novels, whist, and endless marital gossip. Some of it's quite cute, although the main effect is to make you realise how brilliant Frances Burney was, who did this kind of thing ten times better and ten years earlier. There are also twinges of Williams's radical politics in here; the novel is set in 1776 and contains some sympathetic scenes from the American Revolution, as well as a visionary look forward to the fall of the Bastille.

The love-triangle theme was a prominent one of the times, and Julia brings to mind her namesake in Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse who was in a comparable situation. The other very obvious thematic influence is Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, which is actually discussed in Julia in rather interesting terms:

‘I think there can be but one opinion of that book,’ replied Julia: ‘every one must acknowledge that it is well written, but few will justify its principles.’ ‘I am one of those few,’ replied Seymour. ‘I am sorry for it,’ answered Julia; ‘but we will talk no more about it, for I do not wish to like it better.’ ‘But one word,’ said Seymour, ‘and I have done. People talk of the bad tendency of this book, and blame the author for blending virtue and vice in the same character, because the example is dangerous. Does any person, when pleased with a book, immediately determine to imitate the hero of it in every particular? And has not the Author of our being blended virtue and vice in the great book of nature?’

This shows Williams aware of the idea that characters in novels could be flawed, yet still rejecting it for her own novel – Julia is herself a paragon of virtue, in line with the contemporary idea that novels could justify their existence only by offering role models. Like Julie and Werther, Julia resolves its love triangle by killing off one of the points, which was apparently the only way to absolve all the guilty feels. Natasha Duquette, in the introduction to this edition, suggests that male reviewers have found this ending less positive than female reviewers, who have read it as a kind of feminist vision. I have to admit that I fall into this pattern, since I definitely did not see it as a positive way to finish when Julia abandoned any hopes of romantic satisfaction and instead ‘found consolation in the duties of religion, the exercise of benevolence, and the society of persons of understanding and merit’.

Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote a rave review of Julia, would present a similarly disappointing utopian vision in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman a couple of years later. One would like to think that there is more to aim for than just religious consolation – or any consolation, for that matter. My principle is that getting some satisfaction is better than being consoled for the lack of it. Ultimately, the aim of Julia is for (young, female) readers to ‘avoid similar wretchedness, by guarding their minds against the influence of passion’, and this may have been good advice given the prevailing power relations of the time, but still, it's a depressingly limiting ideal.

[Sierra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book for the most part; Williams's prose is a treat. I also really loved the character of Mr. Clifford (the elder); his moral and religous legacy to his granddaughter, Julia, was a beautiful addition. However, the ending felt abrupt, though perhaps a logical conclusion. It was simply not my cup of tea in terms of storyline.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, but the copy I checked out from the library only contained the first volume. Therefore I'm giving it four stars.