WOLLSTONECRAFT, Mary.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. First edition of the author's curious travelogue. The nuanced epistolary series is an early example of an English-language account of a woman travelling on business. It was Wollstonecraft's most popular lifetime work: Swedish, Dutch, and Portuguese translations appeared in 1798, 1799, and 1806 respectively.Wollstonecraft, accompanied by her infant daughter and a maid, travelled to Scandinavia during the summer of 1795. She was tasked, as the agent for her partner Gilbert Imlay, with negotiating compensation for the loss of valuable cargo supposedly swindled from Imlay by a Norwegian ship captain. The resulting 25 letters combine autobiographical details with observations on sociology, national character, education, and the relationship between reason and imagination. They are "a fascinating mixture of autobiography and travel writing, often leaving readers with the impression that the places Wollstonecraft visits and the people she encounters are only secondary in importance to the traveller's own experiences, and that her journey is one of personal progress rather than one of geographical and social exploration" (Radu, p. 267).The Letters inspired the later generation of Romantic poets. "The theme of the book - a solitary traveller wandering through wild, rugged and remote places, and suffering from the absence and indifference of a lover - helped to set a fashion for questing romantic journeys. Byron,

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