Ariadna Vladimirovna Tyrkova was born on 13 November 1869, the daughter of Vladimir Tyrkov, a landowner whose hereditary estate was Vergezhi in the Novgorod region.

[1] Later the same year, she was arrested again, sentenced to 30 months in prison and fled to Stuttgart, where she met Williams; together they moved to Paris.

In 1906, she married Harold Williams (1876–1928), a New Zealand-British Slavist who was working as a journalist in Saint Petersburg for the Morning Post.

[4] In 1911, the family was briefly embroiled in controversy, when Harold Williams was accused of espionage, supposedly as a result of Russian secret police machinations.

[6] On March 17, 1917, immediately after the February Revolution, Tyrkova-Williams was elected a member of the Petrograd Committee of the Kadet party.

After the second World War, in March 1951, she migrated to the United States of America and later published three volumes of memoirs (1952, 1954, 1956) in Russian.