Jane Louisa Willyams

{{Short description|British novelist and historian}}

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Jane Louisa Willyams (20 October 1786 – 28 May 1878) was a British novelist and historian. Her work focused on early Protestantism in Europe.

Jane Louisa Willyams was born on 20 October 1786 at Carnaton House in Cornwall. She was one of eight children of James Willyams.{{Cite journal |date=8 June 1878 |title=Obituary |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VoOt3K-gW6IC |journal=The Academy |pages=508}}

With her sister Charlotte Champion Willyams Pascoe she wrote a novel, Coquetry (1818), published thanks to the help of Sir Walter Scott.

Willyams never married. After the death of her father in 1828, Willyams became a resident of a Protestant nunnery in Bristol, the Ladies’ Association. She left the following year, writing about her "disappointment at not finding the society composed of consistent and self-denying Christians."{{Cite thesis |last=Collier |first=Jacqueline |title=A 'blessed asylum' or a utopian vision: the viability of a Protestant nunnery in early nineteenth-century England |date=June 2014 |degree=PhD |publisher=Bath Spa University |url=http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/5158/1/Collier%20PhD%20final.pdf}}

After a four month stay at Chillon Castle, she published the novel Chillon: or, Protestants of the Sixteenth Century. An Historical Tale in 1845. The same year she published an anti-Catholic tract, The Reason Rendered: A Few Words Addressed to the Inhabitants of M——, in Cornwall.{{Cite book |last=Gleadle |first=Kathryn |url=https://academic.oup.com/british-academy-scholarship-online/book/20033 |title=Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815-1867 |date=2009-09-24 |publisher=British Academy |isbn=978-0-19-726449-2 |edition=1 |language=en |doi=10.5871/bacad/9780197264492.001.0001}}

She published a history of the Waldensians, a heretical sect founded in the 12th century often seen as proto-Protestant, in 1855 and a novel about the Hapsburgs, The Tower of the Hawk, in 1871.

Jane Louisa Willyams died on 28 May 1878 in Budleigh Salterton.