Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Mary Wollstonecraft

• Publisher: Restless Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781632060068
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

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.

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...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• LETTERS WRITTEN DURING A SHORT RESIDENCE IN SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• COLOPHON