‘Citizen of the World’: Feminist Cosmopolitanism and Collective and Affective Languages of Citizenship in the 1790s

Abstract

Describing her reaction to the celebration of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille in the summer of 1790, British writer Helen Maria Williams exclaimed, ‘it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world’ (Williams 2001: 69). Williams was one of the first British women radicals to embark on a pilgrimage to revolutionary France, and during her stay, she hosted a salon that was visited by, amongst others, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. Later, during the terror, Williams was imprisoned (Kennedy 2002: 13–14). In her widely read travelogue of the French Revolution, Letters Written in France (published in 1790), Williams experiments with affective and rhetorical models of cosmopolitan citizenship. Her writing then influenced other British women writers of the period, amongst them Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth and Mary Wollstonecraft (Craciun 2007: 169–185; Wohlgemut 2009: 54–70, 71–95). The political engagement of the radical women of this period has often been understood as primarily individualist in orientation, but this chapter suggests that Williams’ affective and aesthetic approach to cosmopolitanism positions her as a writer who contributed to the development of an alternative feminist literary tradition of thinking about citizenship through a more collectivist lens.