Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

By Mary Wollstonecraft and Joanna Kavenna

While best remembered for her revolutionary work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), renowned feminist, author, and thinker Mary Wollstonecraft’s most popular book during her lifetime was a remarkable travel narrative, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

The impetus behind Wollstonecraft’s journey couldn’t be more dramatic: Her relationship with her lover on rocky ground, Wollstonecraft sets out for Scandinavia in order to retrieve a stolen treasure ship for him. As she travels across the dramatic landscape, she writes vividly of the people she encounters, events she witnesses, and the sublime natural landscape. Yet the letters also reflect her anguish as she comes to realize that her love affair is fated to end.

In its day, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark inspired hordes of readers to travel to Scandinavia. Now, with a new introduction by acclaimed travel author and novelist Joanna Kavenna, Mary Wollstonecraft's remarkable Letters will enchant a new generation of readers and world travelers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781632060068

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and feminist. Born in London, Wollstonecraft was raised in a financially unstable family. As a young woman, she became friends with Jane Arden, an intellectual and socialite, and Fanny Blood, a talented illustrator and passionate educator. After several years on her own, Wollstonecraft returned home in 1780 to care for her dying mother, after which she moved in with the Blood family and began planning live independently with Fanny. Their plan proved financially impossible, however, and Fanny soon married and moved to Portugal, where, in 1785, she died from complications of pregnancy. This inspired Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), launching her career as one of eighteenth-century England’s leading literary voices. In 1790, in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Men, a political pamphlet defending the cause of the French Revolution, advocating for republicanism, and illustrating the ideals of England’s emerging middle class. Following the success of her pamphlet, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a groundbreaking work of political philosophy and an early feminist text that argues for the education of women as well as for the need to recognize them as rational, independent beings. The same year, Wollstonecraft travelled to France, where she lived for a year while moving in Girondist circles and observing the changes enacted by the newly established National Assembly. In 1793, she was forced to leave France as the Jacobins rose to power, executing many of Wollstonecraft’s friends and colleagues and expelling foreigners from the country. In 1797, she married the novelist and anarchist philosopher William Godwin, with whom she bore her daughter Mary, who would eventually write the novel Frankenstein (1818). Several days afterward, however, Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 from septicemia, leaving a legacy as a pioneering feminist and unparalleled figure in English literature.

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LETTERS

WRITTEN

DURING A SHORT RESIDENCE

IN

SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK

BY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

With a new introduction by Joanna Kavenna

INTRODUCTION

Mary Wollstonecraft is known as a philosopher and a feminist, who denounced stifling social mores and contemporary notions of feminine fragility. She made a living, and a reputation, from her writing; she forced the parameters of intellectual society to widen and admit her. Wollstonecraft raged against her contemporaries: her first major work, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), was a forceful refutation of Edmund Burke’s conservative tract, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft took on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and lumpen theories of essentialism, and argued instead for the need to educate and foster the minds of women. In her work in general, she opposed the aristocracy of entail and unearned privilege, she was a passionate advocate for liberty. She saw women and men imprisoned in cages of social ordinance – their sentences justified by supposedly veridical references to tradition or to Nature. She protested against such drabness and the diminution of unique individual experience. She believed in strong feeling, in vibrancy and conviction, and she despised the then-fashionable archetype of the weak-willed woman, who spent her days in a perpetual near-faint and must always be directed by men.

Wollstonecraft was born on 27th April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second eldest of seven children, to a respectable and originally affluent family. Her mother was Irish and her father was English. Wollstonecraft’s childhood was acrimonious and volatile: her father squandered his resources, his business ventures failed, and the family moved constantly, from one district of London to another, to Yorkshire and Wales. Wollstonecraft worked from an early age, as a companion and tutor, including a disastrous spell as a governess in Ireland. She later lived in London, and then France. She found work as an editorial assistant, translator, reviewer, and writer, and came under the patronage of the publisher Joseph Johnson, who had also commissioned William Blake. Wollstonecraft was, like Blake, opposed to mind-forg’d manacles, all arbitrary impositions on perception and experience, all opinions ossified into supposed fact: sooner murder an infant in its cradle, than nurse unacted desires, as Blake put it, with willful provocation. Wollstonecraft lived out of wedlock with an American businessman and author named Gilbert Imlay, and gave birth to their child, Fanny, in Le Havre in 1794. She expected an egalitarian relationship with Imlay, but discovered that his notion of unfettered responsive love had little in common with hers. She fell into despair and struggled to continue. She survived two suicide attempts, including one where she plunged from Putney Bridge into the Thames, to be rescued by boatmen. In March 1797, Wollstonecraft married the radical philosopher William Godwin, who described her as a person of exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and... fearless and unstudied veracity. Wollstonecraft died on 10th September 1797, shortly after the birth of her and Godwin’s only child, Mary Godwin (who would, as Mary Shelley, go on to write Frankenstein). She was 38.

Though Wollstonecraft died so young, she had during her short career expounded philosophies more original and adventurous than most of her contemporaries. Her advocacy of equality for women is crucial to her philosophy; she regarded it as integral to any progressive society. She advanced a theory of liberty that the English 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill later adopted: society cannot be deemed civilized where half its people are enslaved on the grounds of their sex, and such ingrained iniquity corrupts men and women alike. The argument of associative corruption was also used by those who campaigned for the abolition of chattel slavery.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is an anomaly within Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre: an epistolary travelogue, more intimate and lyrical than her philosophical writing. It was the most popular of Wollstonecraft’s works of the 1790s, and the last published before her death. It is a distinctive, revolutionary piece of subjectivism, a reverie on landscape, on disappointment (Imlay), on love (her daughter Fanny), on politics, on the evils of unbridled commerce, on the vicissitudes of mortal circumstance. With its vaulting descriptions of nature, it lies firmly within the Romantic tradition, and was cited by poets such as Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It presages, as romantic writing generally does, those ranks of hyper-subjective modernist narrators, recasting the landscape in line with their personal predilections – Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, as well as our contemporary psychogeographers – W. G. Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, Iain Sinclair, Enrique Vila-Matas. What do you see, when you see the view? For Wollstonecraft, for her successors, you see a particular version of reality – your own version – unique, unrepeatable, your one fleeting moment of contact with the world beyond.

The Letters describe a journey of three months duration that Wollstonecraft made during the summer of 1795, accompanied by her daughter Fanny, who was barely a year old at the time, and her maid, Marguerite. The journey was a grail quest, riddled with ironies. For centuries Wollstonecraft’s purpose in Scandinavia was mysterious. However, in recent decades, Scandinavian researchers, including the Swedish historian and politician Per Nyström, collated local shipping and administrative documents from the time, to reveal that Wollstonecraft was sent north by Gilbert Imlay, to represent his (dubious, quasi-legal) interests. She took with her a letter of commission, signed by Imlay, in which she was nominated as his best friend and wife. The former was a subject of some debate between them, and the latter was technically not true. Imlay was a curious character: he had served in the American War of Independence and later became a businessman, buying up land in the new republic. In 1794 Imlay embarked on a new scheme: to trade with France, in defiance of the British naval blockade, by licensing a French ship with Norwegian papers. (France had declared war on Britain in 1793; Denmark-Norway was still neutral.) Imlay seems to have bought a ship in Le Havre, and named it the Maria and Margaretha, presumably after Mary and her maid. He then enlisted a young Norwegian sailor, Peder Ellefsen, to be captain of his ship. Ellefsen reregistered the ship as neutral and it was filled with an opulent cargo of silver. It set sail for Gothenburg, Sweden, under Ellefsen’s charge. There it was meant to exchange silver for Scandinavian grain, and return to France.

The scheme was devious, opportunistic — and not exactly honest. It was fraught with danger, and while Ellefsen eventually turned up in Norway, the ship never reached Gothenburg. Imlay might initially have assumed that storms had sunk his cargo, or that it had been intercepted in some way. What happened is still unknown but it is probable that Ellefsen moored on the southern coast of Norway, near Arendal, and took some of the silver ashore. Perhaps the piratical Ellefsen was so beguiled by his precious cargo that he reneged on his agreement. Yet, even after Ellefsen was arrested, the ship and the silver could not be found. The situation was evidently awkward, the authorities in France and Britain were unlikely to extend much sympathy to a blockade runner like Imlay. Nonetheless, there were murmurs of potential legal redress in Scandinavia. Local judges in Strömstad, Sweden and Tønsberg, Norway were involved. Then there was Ellefsen, on bail, under the protection of his rich family, presumably trying to be as unforthcoming as possible.

Amidst this bewildering melee of dealers, thieves, sailors and judges, Wollstonecraft was commissioned by Imlay to recover his cargo, and find out what had happened to his ship. She sailed from Hull in June 1795, intending to go first to Arendal, though her ship was diverted by poor weather to a landing place near Gothenburg instead. Her itinerary included the towns where the judges lived, as well as Ellefsen’s home port of Risør. She presumably aimed to negotiate some form of legal redress and, if possible, to confront the nefarious captain himself.

Did she travel on the boat in a spirit of chastened fury, shaking her head at the latest misadventure of her sketchy best friend? Was she concerned about their daughter’s future? Was she secretly glad to be out of Britain, away from her sundry emotional and financial dilemmas? She was eminently capable of travel, of negotiation with men, she had lived in revolutionary France, in Ireland. Despite his glaring infelicities, Imlay at least recognized Wollstonecraft’s resources and intelligence and decided to rely on them. (Or, a less sympathetic interpretation: he wanted to get her out of the way, to distract her, to gain himself a reprieve.) Irrespective of the motives of the largely unknowable Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s expedition was remote from the norm. Europe was at war, the future was uncertain, mothers of babies did not generally wander through lands wherein they lacked friends or allies. Wollstonecraft alludes to the quizzical interest she attracted, the mingled solicitation and surprise of her various hosts in Scandinavia, compounded by her insistence on posing men’s questions.

Wollstonecraft journeyed into a realm of rocks and ocean, wind-blasted islands, mists coursing along mysterious inlets, swaddling the cliffs. Timber villages on stubby beaches, the long midsummer evenings, the sun boiling above the horizon. Dirty mottled glaciers on their imperceptible progress to dissolution. The muted skies of the Baltic, the sea like hammered silver. Sweden at the time was the greatest Scandinavian power, having forged a powerful empire under Gustavus Adolphus. Norway was a poor and disenfranchised fishing nation, under the control of Denmark. Scandinavian claims of neutrality were soon to be dissolved: Sweden would support Britain during the Napoleonic wars, while Denmark, following an attack by British forces, later converted formally to the cause of Revolutionary France.

Based on Wollstonecraft’s original correspondence with Imlay, the published Letters are frank and free in tone, apparently conspiratorial, and yet there is significant authorial control over the release of information. Imlay is not mentioned directly, and there are only opaque references to their mutual woes. In the advertisement for the book, Wollstonecraft apologizes for her use of the subjective I: In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person. Yet, she adds, A person has a right, I have sometimes thought...to talk of himself when he can win on our attention by acquiring our affection. It is intriguing to read Wollstonecraft using the male pronoun as the normative form. The defense of subjectivity is clear, nonetheless: the first person, though open to accusations of vanity, may be redeemed by charm. She adds that she hoped to give a just view of the present state of the countries I have passed through, as far as I could obtain information during so short a residence. Though the northern lands had been amply described in such accounts as Letters on Iceland by Uno von Troil (1780) or Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark by William Coxe (1784), there was as yet no real trade in mass tourism in the north and few of Wollstonecraft’s readers would have visited these lands at all. It was necessary for Wollstonecraft to linger on such basic elements as the dress and demeanor of the locals, their penchant for contraband coffee, the arrangement of their houses and what they ate for dinner. Today, such elaborate minutiae, no longer so necessary for readers, might strike many as redundant. Scandinavian culture has been exported in countless films and books, from Henrik Ibsen to Isak Dinesen, Jens Bjørneboe, Siri Hustvedt, the films of Bergman, and the trials of Borgen. The internet is teeming with blogs, travel guides, webcams, Twitter feeds conveying images of the clouds shifting across the southern fjords, the fiery contours of the sunset, vermillion waves, time-jaded rocks. Nowadays, a travelogue from this region need not discourse so earnestly on the customs of the residents; nor would these customs be so strange to us, so varied from one town to another.

Yet, when the world is familiar in its broad brushstrokes, when the patterns of stereotype are well-known, we depend, all the more, on the unique vantage point of the author. We can summon information of a practical sort, on any nation, with a few clicks on a computer: details of populations, capital cities, alleged facts of history, suggestions for places to stay, or eat or drink and so on. But we cannot summon a distinct sensibility, and this is the residual joy of all great travel writing. Wollstonecraft’s account of her northerly travels was published in 1796, two years before William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. Though hailed as revolutionaries, Wordsworth and Coleridge were, like Wollstonecraft, merely reiterating the trans-temporal enterprise of all exciting literature: to express elements of experience so beautifully, so honestly, that they strike a chord with others. This is the enterprise of all those ragged myths and fables that evolve through centuries: Homer’s tales of war, the trials of Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the agonies of Hamlet or Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, or D. H. Lawrence’s I am I. In the pre-20th-century canon, Wollstonecraft remains anomalous – one of those very few women who have gained a place, however tenuous or disputed, in the annals of the Literary and Illustrious. Sappho, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Bronte sisters, Emily Dickinson, George Sand, along with a few distinguished half-known greats – Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew. Judged by rigid social mores, literature descends into camps, coteries, everyone defined by surface particulars, gender or biography. Most vital, most abiding, always, is the human experience that transcends such categories. No one – male or female — had previously encountered and described the world in the way Wollstonecraft did in her Letters. And no one has since.

She is receptive and alert, she moves from descriptions of the scenery to existential ennui to febrile optimism, to fears of death. Her moods shift across the page, and everything is amplified by her predilections. Confronted by a beautiful view, Wollstonecraft lingers, tests its effects:

Reaching the cascade… my soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections… I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited were pleasurable; and, viewing it, my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares — grasping at immortality — it seemed as impossible to stop the current of my thoughts, as of the always varying, still the same, torrent before me — I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come.

This passage is often mentioned, and was influential at the time. Wollstonecraft merges the personal and topographical, she paints herself into the view. She is as much described as the waterfall itself. The waterfall exists within her thoughts, and yet extends them. Her original apology for egotism strikes us again. Wollstonecraft apologizes in part because it is well-mannered to do so. But there is also an edge to the apology. She is challenging the reader to object to this subjective portrait of reality by a writer-who-happens-to-be-a-woman. So many writers-who-happen-to-be-men have memorialized their versions of reality in prose and verse and song, and their works have been heralded as expressions of something called the human condition. Wollstonecraft’s apology veils an enquiry: when a woman writes in the first person, is she seen to express the human condition as well, or is she relegated on the grounds of her sex?

The question is still pertinent. Yet, Wollstonecraft delights in the process, even if the response is uncertain. Her style is free and fervent and mercurial. She is eloquent and in love with her daughter: My little cherub was again hiding her face in my bosom. I heard her sweet cooing beat on my heart... She is bold and curious: "Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their native country,

Reviews for Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A mistaken tenderness, however, for their children, makes them even in summer load them with flannels, and having a sort of natural antipathy to cold water, the squalid appearance of the poor babes, not to speak of the noxious smell which flannel and rugs retain, seems a reply to a question I had often asked—Why I did not see more children in the villages I passed through? Indeed the children appear to be nipt in the bud, having neither the graces nor charms of their age. And this, I am persuaded, is much more owing to the ignorance of the mothers than to the rudeness of the climate. Rendered feeble by the continual perspiration they are kept in, whilst every pore is absorbing unwholesome moisture, they give them, even at the breast, brandy, salt fish, and every other crude substance which air and exercise enables the parent to digest.This was a bit hard-going. The introduction on the version I downloaded from Project Gutenberg mentioned her suicide attempts and implied that Gilbert Imlay sent her off to Scandinvia to get her out of the way, but neither the introduction nor the letters explain the purpose of the business trip or what she did in all the towns she visited. It isn't at all clear to start with that she is travelling with her baby daughter and a maid. The initial references to someone called Matilda were confusing, and although it gradually became clearer that she was the Queen or ex-Queen of Denmark and had been unpopular due to some scandal or other, I had to look various names up in Wikipedia in order to get to grips with the Danish court intrigues that Wollstonecraft was alluding to.Starting in Sweden, she travels to Norway, and Denmark and finally to Germany, returning to England from Hamburg. She comments a lot on the scenery, the houses and how warmly dressed the children are, even in the summer when she thinks that they must be overheating, being wrapped up so warmly. Out of the places she visits, Norway is by far her favourite of the countries she visits, having superior scenery, great pilots, and better rural housing, but she isn't really impressed with the Scandinavian people or society. She mentions a few times how warm they keep their houses, seeming scared to let any air in even in the heat of summer, and she worries that they may be injuring their children by keeping them too warm compared to what her own daughter is wearing.This book is the first of Mary Wollstonecraft's writings that I have read. While she is undertaking a business trip to several countries without being accompanied by a man, but on the other, she comes across a bit whiny and passive aggressive in addressing the lover who was soon to dump her once and for all, and I think it would probably be better to start with one of her other, more polemical books. On the whole, it was a bit dull, but it would probably have been more interesting to read an annotated version of her letters so I had more of an idea what was going on.