BRINGING HOME THE EXOTIC:
Mary Wollstonecraft
Letters Written During a Short Residence
in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
(1796)
The Library's early book buyers acquired the work of only one 18th-century female traveler: the
pioneering author and human rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. Although a minor work, her
Letters Written During a Short Residence is the hinge in a central chapter of her personal life, as well as
a good index of the radical turn of her mind.
By the summer of 1795, when Wollstonecraft visited Scandinavia, she was already notorious for the
views expressed in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787),
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), and the novel
Mary (1788).
She had fled England once before, following the humiliating
dissolution of her romance with the painter Henry Fuseli. She arrived in France just as the Reign
of Terror broke out, only to meet a new and even more problematic lover, American adventurer
Gilbert Imlay. Their affair inspired her new book,
An Historical and Moral View of the French
Revolution, and produced a daughter named Fanny.
Although Wollstonecraft may have considered their relationship a marriage, Imlay clearly did not,
and in 1794 he left France and his family behind. Falling into depression, Wollstonecraft wrote him
many obsessive letters and finally returned to London, only to find him with another woman. Imlay
narrowly prevented her committing suicide. In a last-ditch bid for his affections, Wollstonecraft
undertook to intercede for him with some business partners in Scandinavia, taking only the infant
Fanny and a maid.
The letters Wollstonecraft wrote Imlay during this journey strove to recall him to his duty to
her and their daughter, but they also reclaimed her health and her distinct authorial voice. "My
constitution has been renovated here," she wrote, looking out at a scene of rural beauty in Sweden.
"I have recovered my activity, even whilst attaining a little embonpoint." The letters are written
while traveling or staying at a quick succession of inns, but the author takes the time to observe
both nature and society and shares her excitement at seeing Elsinore and other historical sites.
Wollstonecraft finds the Swedes charming but distressingly backward and poorly clothed and
fed. In Norway and Denmark, by contrast, she commends the leniency of Danish law and general
religious and social toleration. "Though the king of Denmark be an absolute monarch, yet [the
people] appear to enjoy all the blessings of freedom," she writes approvingly.
Her familiar topics are still with her. She blames the poverty of the Swedish working class partly
on the rise in taxes for the wars of Charles XII and remarks acidly, "...a man may strike a man with
impunity because he pays him wages....Still the men stand up for the dignity of man, by oppressing
the women." Anticipating Imlay's response, she adds, "Still harping on the same subject, you will
exclaim - How can I avoid it, when most of the struggles of an eventful life have been occasioned
by the oppressed state of my sex; we reason deeply, when we forcibly feel."
Wollstonecraft acknowledges the strong influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
Reveries of a Solitary
Walker on her opinions; she cannot condone Rousseau's rejection of society for an idealized
wildness, however. "I am delighted with the romantic views I daily contemplate, animated by the
purest air; and I am interested by the simplicity of manners which reign around me. Still nothing
so soon wearies out the feelings as unmarked simplicity. I am, therefore, half convinced, that I could
not live very comfortable exiled from the countries where mankind are so much further advanced
in knowledge, imperfect as it is, and unsatisfactory to the thinking mind."
Despite the writing and the work on his behalf, Wollstonecraft could not win back Imlay's heart.
While the letters were being readied for publication in 1796, their author tried to drown herself in
the Thames but was rescued by a passerby.
But if her views on Scandinavia left Imlay cold, they won her another admirer. "If ever there
was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book,"
wrote her old acquaintance William Godwin. "She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us
with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which
commands all our admiration." Godwin and Wollstonecraft married the next year, though their
longed-for equal partnership was cut short by Wollstonecraft's death. The
Letters Written During a
Short Residence, her last finished book, stands as an intimate window into both her personal life and
her revolutionary thought.
Further Reading:
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