ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Helme, who died in 1813, was a popular novelist. She was married to William Helme, a schoolmaster in Brentford. Helme began her literary career with Louisa; or, The Cottage on the Moor (1787), followed by Clara and Emmeline; or The Maternal Benediction (1788), and Duncan and Peggy: A Scottish Tale (1794). Helme was also an accomplished translator of French and German works. She translated François Le Vaillant’s travel narrative, Travels from the Cape of Good-Hope into the interior parts of Africa (1790), Joachim Heinrich Campe’s trilogy, Columbus; or, The Discovery of America (1799); Cortez; or The Conquest of Mexico (1799); and Pizarro; or The Conquest of Peru (1799). Helme also produced an abridged version of Plutarch’s Lives and a range of other novels, redacted histories, and popular tracts. In the preface to her Scottish saga, St. Clair of the Isles; or the Outlaws of Barra (1803), published a decade before her death, Helme acknowledges already having published ‘twenty-eight volumes of original works, and twenty-four of translations and abridgements’ in about sixteen years. Of her ten novels, Louisa, Farmer, and St. Clair were steadily reprinted throughout the nineteenth century (Summers, Gothic Bibliography, pp. 62–4).
