A TOUR IN SWITZERLAND

Hailed by her contemporaries as possibly her best book, Helen Maria Williams`s A Tour in Switzerland offered readers across Europe an original travel narrative which, more than two hundred years later, has lost none of its freshness or interest. Williams (1759-1827) was a controversial British author, salon hostess and radical thinker. While she is best known for her eight volumes of letters defending the French Revolution, A Tour in Switzerland was widely reviewed and translated into four languages, notably in French by the economist Jean-Baptiste Say. Published on the eve of the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798, her book provides rare insight into the mind of a well-informed, curious and politically engaged Revolutionary-era woman writer and exemplifies recent critical assertions that travel writing offered women an important medium of public expression. The Tour describes Williams`s five-month stay in Switzerland with her partner John Hurford Stone and the exiled politician Benjamin Vaughan in 1794. If her descriptions of the Alps are written in a lively style mixing science and sensibility, her reports on Switzerland`s institutions and inhabitants are deeply ironic and highly partisan, serving to deconstruct the Swiss myth of natural liberty. A hybrid text, Williams adds a review of Parisian society in 1795 and a political synopsis on the Swiss republics all the way up to late 1797. This edition brings together a newly edited and annotated text that includes variants in Say`s French translation along with an introduction, chronology, map and five appendices which provide new details on Williams`s tour and help situate the book`s place within the debate on Swiss republicanism. Beyond its importance to scholars working on the Swiss Enlightenment, on Romantic literature, and on travel and natural history writing, A Tour in Switzerland will also appeal to the general reader interested in Switzerland and the Alps.

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