She has been known as a correspondent of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, whom she praised for being a "native genius, gay, unique and strong" in an introductory poem she inscribed on his Glenriddell Manuscripts.
Helen Craik was born at Arbigland, Kirkbean, 15 miles south of Dumfries, in the historical county of Kirkcudbrightshire, probably in 1751, as one of the six legitimate children of William Craik (1703–1798), a landowner and agriculturalist who improved a large estate of relatively poor land, and his wife Elizabeth (died 1787), daughter of William Stewart of Shambellie, in the next parish of New Abbey.
[11] Craik wrote a lengthy poem based on Goethe's novel, probably in the late 1770s, from the point of view of Werther's guilt-ridden love Charlotte.
One explanation for her move has been her family's rumoured disapproval of her friendship with a groom on her father's estate, who was found shot, officially ruled as suicide, but locally believed to have been murdered by one of the Craiks.
[13] There was certainly a breach between Craik and her immediate family, but in the absence of contemporary evidence for the romance and either suicide or murder, modern scholars have been cautious about the story.
With contrasting strong female characters, and featuring revolutionary violence, and the massacre on monks in the remote monastery of La Trappe (reworking material from her poem), this has been called "perhaps the most impressive" of novels of opinion "in terms of its integration of plot and politics.
"[16] Adrianna Craciun has drawn parallels between Craik's treatment of the French Revolution and Fanny Burney's novel The Wanderer, set in 1793 and written in the 1790s and intermittently up to its publication in 1814: "Like Burney, Craik does not ultimately support the French Revolution (though she creates some genial revolutionary characters like Corday in Adelaide de Norbonne, 1796, but rather removes her characters 'from the increasing anarchy prevalent in France' to 'the more peaceful island of Great Britain'" (p. 368).
Stella of the North, or The Foundling of the Ship (4 vols, 1802), also dealing with the French Revolution, but set in her native Dumfriesshire,[18] features two mysterious babies, one dead and one to be heroine.
Her obituaries and her memorial in the village church call her a published author in English and French (works in the latter have not survived) and a philanthropist to the poor, a theme that appears in her novels.