A religious dissenter, she was a supporter of abolitionism and of the ideals of the French Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror and spent much of the rest of her life in France.

[2] She was born on 17 June 1759 in London to a Scottish mother, Helen Hay, and a Welsh army officer father, Charles Williams.

[1] He had previously served as Secretary for Minorca when it was a British possession, and accumulated enough personal property that his widow and daughters lived comfortably on the income from his estate and pension.

She enthusiastically attended the Fête de la Fédération on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and returning briefly to London in 1791 was a staunch, though not completely uncritical, defender of the Revolution.

Nonetheless, he proved to be, in this respect, more lenient than the revolutionary government had been to this now-famous international literary figure: she spent a single day in prison and continued to live and write in Paris.

After the Bourbon Restoration, she became a naturalised French citizen in 1818; nonetheless, in 1819 she moved to Amsterdam to live with Athanase Laurent Charles Coquerel, a nephew she had helped raise.