Helen Maria Williams arrived in France in July 1790, just in time to witness the Festival of the Federation on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. She was twenty-eight, already a published poet and novelist; she would live in France for most of the rest of her life. During the next turbulent six years, Williams published eight volumes of letters reporting on the French Revolution to British readers. They gained considerable circulation and were excerpted in magazines and miscellanies. According to Robert D. Mayo, she was “for more than ten years the principal interpreter and popular spokesman [sic] for political changes in the neighboring republic.” In her letters two seemingly disparate 1790s phenomena converge: the fashionable “rage” for landscape, which peaked during this decade, and the historic raging of the Revolution. An open advocate of revolutionary ideals, Williams was also immersed in the language of landscape aesthetics. Landscape description insistently recurs as a metaphor and structuring principle throughout her letters, which mobilize aestheti-cized nature in a sustained if increasingly strained effort to make sense of the historic events in France and naturalize them for British readers.