Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

"It had many different effects. I once asked a friend who likes women what effect those letters would have on a man and he said they would make him run a mile. It did not work as a way of endearing herself to a scoundrel. But Godwin said the opposite, he said it made one fall in love with the reader. In any event, it was influential on travel writing and on the Romantics , the German Romantics in particular. It influenced Coleridge . She writes about being in various places in Scandinavia and being astonished at the lack of curiosity of some people when the ship approaches. She talks about the theater. It’s a travel report. You were saying earlier that she’s quite modern. The way in which travel literature has taken off in the last 50 years is extraordinary. Every newspaper, apart from recipes, has to have a huge travel section. That’s what she did when she wrote these letters. She never had a word against marriage as such and indeed was looking forward to domesticity with Godwin. She would have loved to have had the same with Imlay. If anything, as I was saying earlier, the 1960s feminists thought she was a bit too much for marriage and certainly not enough for sex, as they saw it. In fact, she was much more complicated and interesting on any subject than one might imagine. The way the relationship with Imlay goes against the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman is because she writes that great romantic relations happen once every 100 years. We’re not all going to be Anna Karenina. By implication, what one needs to look for is somebody that one can be friends with and a companion to, not this great romance. But she fell passionately in love with Imlay. It’s a deep sexual and physical longing. He must have told her a lot of falsehoods. He certainly didn’t tell her, as has been discovered not too long ago, that he had a share in a slave transporting ship."

"Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th-century English philosopher. She’s best known for authoring a book called A Vindication of the Rights of Women where she argues that women should be treated equally to men, especially with regard to education. When she was writing in the late 1700s, there was a widespread belief that women didn’t have the same mental capacities as men, that they weren’t suited to study things like mathematics or science or philosophy. She argued that wasn’t true—women just weren’t educated in these things. If we were all educated the same, women could participate as well as men. She’s best known as a philosopher and in particular as a feminist philosopher, but she also wrote this travel book. The backstory to this travel book is the stuff that soap operas are made of. She had an affair with an American privateer, Gilbert Imlay. She was living in England and then she moved to Paris for a little while, which is where she met him. They had what appears to be a passionate love affair and she became pregnant. They were married (not legally but informally) so he described her as his ‘wife.’ Although it seems that he was unfaithful, she then went to Scandinavia on his behalf to conduct some business. And it was revealed, in the late 20th century, that she was trying to get hold of some treasure of his that may or may not have been on a ship that had sunk. Yes. She went to Scandinavia with her young baby and a maid. She left them behind in one of the cities while she travelled inland through Sweden, Norway and Denmark alone. It was a hell of a thing to do for a woman back then. She wanted money because she wanted independence from Imlay. So she began writing her Letters . The book is presented as a series of letters to a friend, but of course they’re not regular letters—it’s an extremely well-crafted piece of work. Yes, it’s an epistolary book. It’s important in a number of ways. One thing that happened in the 17th century was Francis Bacon developed this new philosophy of science. He said that we can’t find out about the world by sitting in an armchair; we have to go out and bring back information about it. After Bacon’s death, the British Royal Society carried through this project. They began paying sailors, travellers and merchants to bring back all kinds of information about minerals, animals, flowers—whatever they could think of. Yes, it is. Aristotle did that and then the whole process was abandoned. There was a lull of more than 1500 years and then Bacon picked it up again. Something that went hand in hand with this project was that they asked travellers to write in a straightforward, factual style, which had a massive impact on travel writing. Lots of travel writing before this period was frankly made up. If you read books like The Travels of Sir John Mandeville , he’s happily writing about unicorns and men who have the heads of dogs. Separating fact from fiction in travel writing was a problem. “Francis Bacon said that we can’t find out about the world by sitting in an armchair; we have to go out and bring back information about it” So everybody began writing in this dull, third-person, scientific style. It’s the sort of thing that you still see in Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle or Captain Cook’s Journals . The tales themselves are gripping, but the writing is often boring. Mary Wollstonecraft was well aware of this. Back in London, she had worked as a writer and an editor for a magazine and read and reviewed dozens of travel books. So in her own travel writing she sets out to do something different. She explains at the start of this book, ‘I couldn’t help but make myself the hero of every little tale. I realize that this is contrary to what normally happens, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ She goes on to describe, in the first person, her own reactions to mountains and glaciers and lakes. She’s knee-deep into the philosophy of the sublime and there’s been some literary scholarship over the last five years in particular that’s shown she wasn’t just a pioneer of travel writing about the sublime—she was a leader. She wasn’t the first person to come up with the theory of the sublime. She was the first person to apply that seriously to travel writing, this feeling of pleasurable terror that you get from looking at a sublime scene. It’s a lovely book to read. She’s a really engaging writer. She reads as a very modern writer, despite the fact it’s a few centuries old. It’s also shot through with her observations on the stage of women in these countries. She’s furious at the way some women are treated, and she has a cutting pen."