Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is a personal travel narrative by the eighteenth-century British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. The twenty-five letters cover a wide range of topics, from sociological reflections on Scandinavia and its peoples to philosophical questions regarding identity. Published by Wollstonecraft's career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson, it was the last work issued during her lifetime.
Wollstonecraft undertook her tour of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in order to retrieve a stolen treasure ship for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. Believing that the journey would restore their strained relationship, she eagerly set off. However, over the course of the three months she spent in Scandinavia, she realized that Imlay had no intention of renewing the relationship. The letters, which constitute the text, drawn from her journal and from missives she sent to Imlay, reflect her anger and melancholy over his repeated betrayals. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is therefore both a travel narrative and an autobiographical memoir.
Using the rhetoric of the sublime, Wollstonecraft explores the relationship between self and society in the text. She values subjective experience, particularly in relation to nature; champions the liberation and education of women; and illustrates the detrimental effects of commerce on society.
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was Wollstonecraft's most popular book in the 1790s—it sold well and was reviewed favorably by most critics. Wollstonecraft's future husband, philosopher William Godwin, wrote: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book."Godwin, 95. It influenced Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on its themes and its aesthetic. While the book initially inspired readers to travel to Scandinavia, it failed to retain its popularity after the publication of Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, which revealed Wollstonecraft's unorthodox private life.
Biographical background
In 1790, at the age of thirty-one, Wollstonecraft made a dramatic entrance onto the public stage with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a work that helped propel the British pamphlet war over the French Revolution. Two years later she published what has become her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Anxious to see the revolution firsthand, she moved to France for about two years, but returned in 1795 after revolutionary violence increased and the lover she met there, American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, abandoned her and their illegitimate daughter, Fanny Imlay. Shortly after her return to Britain, Wollstonecraft attempted suicide in May; Imlay, however, managed to save her.
One month after her attempted suicide, Wollstonecraft agreed to undertake the long and treacherous journey to Scandinavia in order to resolve Imlay's business difficulties. Not only was her journey to Scandinavia fraught with peril (she was a woman travelling alone during a time of war), it was also laced with sorrow and anger. While Wollstonecraft initially believed that the trip might resurrect their relationship, she eventually recognized that it was doomed, particularly after Imlay failed to meet her in Hamburg.Jacobus, 64; 68; Holmes, 18. Wollstonecraft's despair increased as her journey progressed.
On her return to Britain in September, Wollstonecraft tried to commit suicide a second time: she attempted to drown herself in the River Thames but was rescued by passersby.Jacobus, 64. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, which draws its material from her journal and the letters she sent Imlay during the three-month tour, was published in by Wollstonecraft's close friend and career-long publisher, Joseph Johnson. Written after her two suicide attempts, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark frequently returns to the topic of death; it recreates Wollstonecraft's mental state while she was in Scandinavia and has been described as a suicide note addressed to Imlay, although he is never referred to by name in the published text.Swaab, 19. It is the last work by Wollstonecraft published within her lifetime: she died in childbirth just one year later.
Scandinavian journey and Imlay's business interests Although Wollstonecraft appears as only a tourist in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, during her travels she was actually conducting delicate business negotiations on behalf of Imlay. For almost two hundred years, it was unclear why she had travelled to Scandinavia, but in the 1980s historian Per Nyström uncovered documents in local Swedish and Norwegian archives that shed light on the purpose of her trip. He revealed that Wollstonecraft was searching for a ship and cargo that had been stolen from Imlay. Imlay had authorized her to conduct his business dealings, referring to her in legal documents as "Mrs. Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife", although the two were not married.Nyström, 18.
The intricate details of Imlay's business dealings are laid out clearly by Nyström. On 1794, Peder Ellefsen, who belonged to a rich and influential Norwegian family, bought a ship called the Liberty from agents of Imlay in Le Havre, France. It would later become clear that Ellefsen never owned the ship but rather engaged in a pro-forma sale on behalf of Imlay. He renamed the ship the Maria and Margaretha (presumably after Mary and her maid Marguerite) and had the Danish Consulate in Le Havre certify it so that the ship could pass through the British blockade of France (Imlay was a blockade runner). Carrying silver and gold Bourbon plate, the ship sailed from France under a Danish flag and arrived at Copenhagen on 1794. Although Ellefsen supposedly ordered the ship to continue on to Gothenburg, it never reached its destination. Imlay engaged in several fruitless attempts to locate the ship and its valuable cargo and then dispatched Wollstonecraft to negotiate an agreement with Ellefsen, who had subsequently been arrested for stealing the ship and its contents. Wollstonecraft's success or failure in the negotiations is unknown as is the ultimate fate of the ship and its treasure.Nyström, 22ff.
To engage in these negotiations, Wollstonecraft travelled first to Gothenburg, where she remained for two weeks. Leaving Fanny and her nurse Marguerite behind, she embarked for Strömstad, Sweden, where she took a short detour to visit the fortress of Fredriksten, and then proceeded to Larvik, Norway. From there she travelled to Tønsberg, Norway, where she spent three weeks. She also visited Helgeroa, Risør, and Kristiania (now Oslo) and returned by way of Strömstad and Gothenburg, where she picked up Fanny and Marguerite again. She returned to England by way of Copenhagen and Hamburg, finally landing at Dover in September 1795, three months after she had left her home country.Nyström 9–10.
Structure, genre, and style Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark consists of twenty-five letters that address an extensive range of contentious political topics, such as prison reform, land rights, and divorce laws, as well as less controversial subjects, such as gardening, salt works, and sublime vistas. Wollstonecraft's political commentary extends the ideas she had presented in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794); her discussion of prison reform, for example, is informed by her own experiences in revolutionary France and those of her friends, many of whom were jailed.Holmes, 26; Swaab, 22–23.
While at first glance Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark appears to be a travel narrative, it is actually a "generic hybrid". The nature of this hybridity, however, is not altogether agreed upon by scholars. Some emphasize Wollstonecraft's fusion of the travelogue with the autobiography or memoir (a word used by Wollstonecraft in the book's advertisement),Myers, 166; Swaab, 16. while others see it as a travelogue cum epistolary novel.Swaab, 17. The text, which reveals Wollstonecraft's thought processes, flows seamlessly from autobiographical reflections to musings on nature to political theories. However, it is unified by two threads: the first is Wollstonecraft's argument regarding the nature and progress of society; the second is her increasing melancholy.Myers, 166; 170; 181; Holmes, 19; Poovey, 92; Swaab, 25. Although Wollstonecraft aims to write as a philosopher, the image of the suffering woman dominates the book.Kelly, 178; Myers, 171.
Travel narrative: "the art of thinking" One-half of the "generic hybridity" of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is the epistolary travel narrative.Myers, 169–70. Wollstonecraft's conception of this genre was shaped by eighteenth-century empirical and moral travel narratives, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society (1764), Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), and Arthur Young's travel books.Myers, 173; Swaab, 17–18; Kelly, 177; Holmes, 17; Parks, 32.
After reviewing twenty-four travel books for Joseph Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft was well-versed in the genre. This extensive reading solidified her ideas of what constituted a good travel book; in one review, she maintained that travel writers should have "some decided point in view, a grand object of pursuit to concentrate their thoughts, and connect their reflections" and that their books should not be "detached observations, which no running interest, or prevailing bent in the mind of the writer rounds into a whole".Qtd. in Swaab, 15; see also, Swaab, 14; Myers, 166; Kelly, 177. Her reviews praised detailed and engaging descriptions of people and places, musings on history, and an insatiable curiosity in the traveller.Swaab, 14; see also Holmes, 32.
"The art of travel is only a branch of the art of thinking", Wollstonecraft wrote.Qtd. in Swaab, 15. Her journey and her comments on it are, therefore, not only sentimental but also philosophical. She uses the two modes to continue the critique of the roles afforded women and the progress of civilization that she had outlined in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution.Kelly, 178–79. After overturning the conventions of political and historical writing, Wollstonecraft brought what scholar Gary Kelly calls "Revolutionary feminism" to yet another genre that had typically been considered the purview of male writers, transforming the travel narrative's "blend of objective facts and individual impressions ... into a rationale for autobiographical revelation".Myers, 181. As one editor of the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark writes, the book is "nothing less than a revolution in literary genres"; its sublimity, expressed through scenes of intense feeling, made "a new wildness and richness of emotional rhetoric" desirable in travel literature.