Helen Maria Williams’ only novel, Julia, was published in 1790 and marks the transition in her writing career from poetry to prose. It is in many ways a conventional novel of sensibility. The eponymous heroine is a woman of exceptionally fine feeling who acts on her benevolent disposition to relieve suffering wherever she finds it. Like Charlotte Smith's novels, Julia satirizes the mores and affectations of the aristocracy and fashionable society. The novel is sketched on a smaller canvas than Smith's, however, mirroring the limited movements of women like Julia Clifford and her cousin Charlotte. At the time of writing Williams was still living in London, and though her social world was broader than that of most women, she had not travelled abroad and, like most of her female peers, her experience of the world was mediated by literature. Like Julia, many heroines of later eighteenth-century fiction by women are avid readers, signifying both a nascent feminist acceptance of women's intellectual and imaginative capacities and the material constraints on other kinds of lived female experience.

The action of Julia largely takes place in and around London and the households of Mrs Melbourne, the Seymours, the Cliffords and the Chartres and in Mr Clifford's estate ‘in the north’ of England. There is some reported movement further afield: the Seymours and Mrs Melbourne go to Scotland and Bath, Mr Clifford, Captain Meynell and Chartres travel to the East Indies. Charlotte accompanies her father to France, where Julia is meant to meet them. Before Julia can make her journey, however, her father becomes ill and dies, and she is left to wait in England for the return of her uncle and cousin. Her ‘experience’ of the larger world, like that of most women in the late eighteenth century, remains vicarious. Frederick Seymour may ‘lead her through half Europe’ but only in her imagination (Julia, 1, 131–2).

Frederick Seymour and the devoted Mr F act for Julia as intermediaries between the public and private spheres. This is a boundary that Julia will struggle to police as the novel progresses, as Seymour, betrothed to her cousin Charlotte but in love with Julia, intrudes with increasing insistence on her internal world.