William Henry Helm (1860–1936) was an English writer known for well-reviewed non-fiction books like Jane Austen and her Country-House Comedy (1909) and Homes of the Past (1921).
[5][6] He was noted in 1885 for writing "a short but bright and original story of the days of Queen Anne" in the Christmas 1884 special issue of the Weekly Freeman titled "How George Stanley Settled his Bill".
[9] In 1900, Helm published a series of "Studies in Style" examining the writing styles of various authors, and was described in The Morning Post as having "hit on the happy idea of reproducing them with just sufficient caricature to make apparent to the simplest intelligence the affectation, or the vulgarity, or the idiosyncracy of the particular writer".
[10] A 1904 book, The Blue Fox, parodying the style of Guy Boothby, was less successful, with one review finding that it "starts well with a clever burlesque of the modern Anglo-American alliance between title and dollars", but later "misses fire somehow", being not sufficiently extravagant.
[13] The book, Jane Austen and her Country-house Comedy, was published that year, with The Athenaeum saying of it: It is a favourite dogma nowadays with the superior person that literary criticism has nothing to do with biography, and that in estimating an author's work no attention should be paid to the facts of his life.
[14]The Book News Monthly wrote that Helm "takes up first the dominant qualities in Jane Austen's works, dilating upon her 'abiding freshness' and comparing her with Balzac and Charlotte Bronte.
[16] In the 21st century, literary scholar Laurence W. Mazzeno wrote that the book was "probably best described as a transitional work between the appreciations offered by the Austen family and many Victorians, and the more systematic critical examinations that would follow in the coming decades".
[19] Fine arts expert Archibald Cecil Chappelow illustrated the well-received 1921 book Homes of the Past, by Helm.