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

Part travel narrative, part meditation, this sequence of twenty-five letters records Mary Wollstonecraft’s solitary journey through Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1795. Officially she traveled to recover a lost cargo ship on behalf of her lover Gilbert Imlay, but the letters read as something far more personal, moving between sharp observation of Scandinavian customs, landscape, and law and long, sorrowful reflection on love, loss, and her own place in the world. The prose, tender and searching, helped shape Romantic ideas about nature and feeling and drew admiration from writers such as Coleridge and Godwin. First published in 1796, it was Wollstonecraft’s most popular book in her lifetime. Free PDF and EPUB edition available.