Helen Maria Williams’s Paul and Virginia (1795) is an English translation of her friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) into which she inserted eight of her own original sonnets. She began her translation in October 1793, while imprisoned during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (1793–1794). Her text is a work of prison writing, within which her sonnets constitute prison verse, as well as a widely read and influential translation of Saint-Pierre’s famous French novel. From the late eighteenth century onwards, critics have questioned Williams for removing sections of philosophical prose from Saint-Pierre’s original French text and adding her own poems. However, her translation was immensely popular; it went into four editions between 1795 and 1799, and these editions were printed in at least 17 different forms in England, France, Germany, Ireland, and America. Williams’s was the standard English translation (Kennedy, Deborah. Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution. Bucknell UP, 2002, 122), and it would influence novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy (Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827. Clarendon, 1993, 56). Twenty-first-century critics have recognized the translation as a significant contribution to commentary on colonial geographies and as a text which contributed to both aesthetic discourse and anti-slavery activism.