Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Mary Wollstonecraft

Jan 2005 · Cosimo, Inc.

About this ebook

"Travellers who require that every nation should resemble their native country, had better stay at home," Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her lover, Gilbert Imlay, in one of a series of letters addressed to him from her travels through Scandinavia in the summer of 1795. With a keen, withering eye, Wollstonecraft, one of the founding mothers of modern feminism, of course offers her insightful observations on the condition of womanhood in these northerly nations. But she also delights the reader with poetic portraits of the landscapes, observations on the rural and urban societies she encounters, and the particular difficulties encountered by a woman travelling alone, with only her infant daughter and a nursemaid for company... especially a woman who asks "men's questions" of those she meets along the way.First collected in book form in 1796, these letters display a strikingly modern attitude from a woman who was far ahead of her time.British writer and educator MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759-1797), the mother of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, espoused her then-radical feminist and liberal philosophies in such works as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and History and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1793).

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London on April 27, 1759. She opened a school in Newington Green with her sister Eliza and a friend Fanny Blood in 1784. Her experiences lead her to attack traditional teaching methods and suggested new topics of study in Thoughts on the Education of Girls. In 1792, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she attacked the educational restrictions that kept women ignorant and dependant on men as well as describing marriage as legal prostitution. In Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, published unfinished in 1798, she asserted that women had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise. In 1793, Wollstonecraft became involved with American writer Gilbert Imlay and had a daughter named Fanny. After this relationship ended, she married William Godwin in March 1797 and had a daughter named Mary in August. Wollstonecraft died from complications following childbirth on September 10, 1797. Her daughter Mary later married Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.