In her only work of prose fiction, Julia, a novel interspersed with poetical pieces (1790), the poet and essayist Helen Maria Williams presents a feminist rebuttal to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloïse (1761). Unlike Rousseau’s Julie, who languishes with desire for her tutor after she has married another man, Williams’s Julia actively resists the advances of a married man and remains single. Julia Clifford’s rebuffs of Frederick Seymour are doubly motivated by her friendship with his wife, Charlotte, Julia’s cousin on her father’s side. Williams’s exposé of harassment is echoed in the subplot of her novel, wherein the impoverished cousin of Frederick, Mrs. Meynell, suffers from the unwanted attentions of Mr. Seymour, Frederick’s elder brother. Williams represents a dysfunctional pattern of obsession in the Seymour men. Countering this pattern, Julia and Charlotte reconcile, and Julia comes alongside Mrs. Meynell in protective friendship. Whereas in Rousseau’s novel Julie dies, in Williams’s Julia, it is Frederick who succumbs to a fever. Julia Clifford, Charlotte Seymour, and Mrs. Meynell survive and live together at the Clifford estate, repurchased by Julia’s uncle Mr. Clifford with funds he procured by working in India. Revealing her democratic political sympathies, Helen Maria Williams interrupts her narrative with a series of letters detailing the struggles of the American Revolution and punctuates it with an elegiac poem entitled “The Bastille: A Vision,” critiquing the cruelties of the ancien régime and expressing hope for change.