Short Residence In Sweden Research Articles

Who is at the helm? Mary Wollstonecraft’s contribution to the romantic construct of the imagination

In my essay I pursue the line of inquiry which has recently been proposed by scholars who have reconstructed the historical context of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to bring into sharper focus what can be seen as consistent motives of her thought. Starting out from the thesis of Barbara Taylor that Wollstonecraft’s feminism was deeply rooted in the egalitarian theology of Radical Protestantism (Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination Cambridge University Press, 2003) I will argue that her brief career shows how, in her analysis of the hierarchy of the cognitive faculties, first she redefined reason by ascribing to it the power of intuitive apprehension, and eventually she replaced reason with imagination as the distinctive attribute of the human mind. Positioning herself—through Price’s theology and moral philosophy—in the Platonic and pagan as well as Christian Neo-Platonic traditions, she arrived several years before Wordsworth or Coleridge not only at an intuition of the creativity of human thinking but at a definition of the imagination as the supreme mental faculty. As a result, in some emotionally highly charged passages of her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she constructed her own version of early Romanticism in England. These passages can be read side by side with passages of epiphany in Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude as the most powerful examples of the imagination leading through an investment in the quotidian to an apprehension of immortality.

Teaching Mary Wollstonecraft's Travelogue of Historical Trauma

Abstract: I teach Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in an undergraduate English literature course on “Survival Narratives of the Eighteenth Century” at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this course is to show how significant perilous voyages were to the ways in which writers in eighteenth-century Britain imagined and interpreted their world. The course draws from the burst of new scholarship on rethinking the traditional “rise of the novel” narrative in imperial, oceanic, and global contexts and develops interpretive frameworks for the eighteenth century’s changing relationship to commerce and exploration. Wollstonecraft’s travelogue is the final text in a syllabus that begins with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and continues with Phillis Wheatley’s poetry about ocean voyages and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Wollstonecraft’s account of traveling in Scandinavia, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, is more concerned with the survival of the human species than the survival of the individual. But reading Wollstonecraft’s travelogue in a course on survival narratives primes students to understand how the material conditions of reading and writing—often taking place under extreme circumstances—shaped the literature being produced in the eighteenth century. In this essay, I describe a metacognitive exercise in which students reflected on Wollstonecraft’s meditation on survival in an era of environmental catastrophe with their own “travelogues” written from where they logged into the Zoom classroom. With classes online at the time due to COVID-19, many of my students drew on this lesson to discuss how a moment of crisis shaped their skills and experiences as writers.

Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACTIn her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

Traveling as the “Art of Thinking” in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s epistolary travelogue Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in the context of conjectural history. By illustrating how she borrows the methodology of conjectural history to trace the improvement of manners in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, the article analyzes the utopia (or dys -topia) Wollstonecraft imagines based on the social progress she observes during her northern travels. It demonstrates that despite her initial faith in human industry and economic prosperity as the driving forces behind civ ilization, Wollstonecraft later expresses grave reservations about the “future improvement of the world” by drawing attention to the harmful effects that commerce can bring to societies. It suggests that such con cerns largely derive from her status as a female traveler who does not enjoy the privileges of the leisured male traveler and is therefore in a more favorable position to reflect on the conditions of the socially disen franchised such as women and the laboring poor. By exploring how Wollstonecraft’s unstable status leads her to critically examine stadial the ory and use various criteria in assessing a nation’s state of civilization, the article examines how she ultimately envisions the world as a “vast pris on” in her travel narrative, thereby anticipating the pessimistic turn in her political vision and later writings.

Mood, Provisionality, and Planetarity in Mary Wollstonecraft's <em>A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark</em>

Mood, Provisionality, and Planetarity in Mary Wollstonecraft's <em>A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark</em>

Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Love of Mankind” and Cosmopolitan Suffering in Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Love of Mankind” and Cosmopolitan Suffering in Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Hospitality and the Nation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>

Creating an “insinuating interest”: Mary Wollstonecraft's travel reviews and A Short Residence

Prior to the publication of her own influential work of travel writing, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft published over 20 reviews of travel books in the Analytical Review. These ranged from essays on the aesthetics of travel, such as those by William Gilpin, to European and domestic tours, including Helen Maria Williams' reports from Revolutionary France, to voyages of exploration. This article argues that collectively this body of reviews articulates a theory of travel and travel writing, which Wollstonecraft then sought to put into practice in her own work. This theory represents an early and formative analysis of the communicative role of narrative and of the traveling “I” in travel writing, features that would later come to be seen as defining characteristics of a Romantic mode of writing about travel.

Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment

Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment

Amelia and John Opie: Conjugal Sociability and Romanticism’s Professional Arts

ROXANNE EBERLE Amelia andJohn Opie: Conjugal Sociability and Romanticism’s Professional Arts t('T'O-7-HAT DIFFERENCE DOES GENDER MAKE TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF W British literary Romanticism?”1 In posing that question, Anne Mellor added her voice to other feminist scholars interested in exploring not only the work of women writers but also the significance of gender to Romanticism’s long-standing characterizations of the imagination, literary endeavor, and the natural world. Twenty years later, Mellor prompts us to go further, asking, “So what comes next?” She calls for “editions of letters and journals, as well as modern editions, densely annotated. . . . We also need full-scale biographies [and] good single-author studies of the entire literary careers of almost all the leading women writers of the Romantic period.”2 The question for biographers working within the field, and one I pose here, rephrases Mellor’s query to: “What difference did gender make to the ways in which authors lived their lives and constructed their careers during the British Romantic period?” My work contributes to sociability studies by detailing an important aspect of Romanticism that is urban, public, and deliberately engaged with the marketplace.3 In the essay that follows, I ex­ plore Amelia and John Opie’s negotiation of courtship and married life during the vexed mid 1790s, when it still seemed possible to imagine alter­ native social conventions in literature and to enact them within the public 1. Romanticism & Gender, i. 2. “Romanticism, History, Historicism: A Conversation,” 156. See also Roxanne Eberle, ed., “Interview with Anne Mellor,” Romantic Circles: Praxis Series, January 2014, http://www .rc.umd.edu/praxis/mcllor_mterview/index.html. 3. See Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds. Romantic Sociability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). SiR, 53 (Fall 2014) 319 320 ROXANNE EBERLE and private spaces ofLondon. Although historical hindsight has led scholars and historians to chart the falling fortunes of progressive politics after the beginning of hostilities with France in 1793 and the Treason Trials of 1794, the rest of the decade saw the publication of texts willing to challenge both social and narrative conventions, including William Godwin’s PoliticalJus­ tice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), and Mary Hays’s Memoirs oj Emma Courtney (1796). A poet, novelist, and essayist, Amelia Alderson Opie was born in 1769 and lived long enough to visit the Crystal Palace when she was in her eighties.4 Throughout that long life, she consistently sought out the most exciting conversations of her day. Her childhood and young adulthood was spent in Norwich, among rational dissenters, Warrington Academy tu­ tors, and political radicals. Amelia began corresponding with Godwin in 1794, and whenever in London she was an active member of progressive sociable circles. In 1796 Godwin introduced her to Hays and Wollstonecraft and she cultivated a friendship with the latter, who quite possibly in­ troduced her to the portrait painter John Opie. John had first painted Wollstonecraft in 1790/91, and quickly become one of Godwin’s friends in the mid 1790s. Any consideration of the courtship and marriage of the Opies necessarily engages with these intersecting circles of professional arts sociability, encompassing the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle, the theater world of Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons, and the Royal Academy Exhibition Halls frequented by John. In marrying John, Amelia found new opportunities within London’s professional arts community, even as many of her former associates strug­ gled to sustain careers, and their marriage has sometimes been characterized as symptomatic of the failure of 1790s political idealism.5 6 Kenneth Johnston invites biographers to reconsider the narrative of progressive retreat so dominant in Romantic studies, which for a long time led to an exclusive focus on those writers who successfully negotiated literary careers despite harboring radical sympathies in the 1790s, William Wordsworth and Sam­ uel Taylor Coleridge most notably/’ Johnston redirects attention to the “almost famous,” including Amelia. But she was actually quite “famous” 4. Throughout the rest ofthe essay I refer to Amelia andjohn Opie by their first names in order to avoid...

“-----Pugh!”: Rereading Punctuation Through Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence

This article examines the publication and punctuation history of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) in an effort to explore what new understandings can be reached when textual studies becomes more sensitive to meanings conveyed by the visual, graphic and performative qualities of text. As Janine Barchas has done with Henry Fielding's “Corrections” to his sister Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744), the article uses Wollstonecraft's nineteenth-century editor Henry Morley's seemingly minor editorial changes to Letters Written during a Short Residence as a starting point to examine the expressive function played by Wollstonecraft's punctuation in this text. It explores three key functions served by the profusion of dashes in parts of Wollstonecraft's travel book: firstly, the way in which dashes signal performances of epistolary spontaneity and intimacy; secondly, their expressive role in representing the rhythms of particular kinds of thought, and in signposting moments of heightened emotion and of embodiment in the text; and, finally, the way in which they act as kinds of typographical stage directions for moments that verbally describe release from various forms of constraint. It argues that Wollstonecraft's most apparently ungrammatical, dash-marked syntactical constructions are vital to the arguments whose rhythms they structure.

<em>Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation</em>, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning

Reviewed by: Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation ed. by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning Jessica R. Valdez (bio) Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning; pp. viii + 205. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, $35.00 paper. This collection of essays productively juxtaposes cultural, formal, and discursive instances of hybridity. Collectively, the essays show that Victorian writers not only treated hybridity as a subject but also manifested it in form and discourse. In his rich introduction, U. C. Knoepflmacher offers a succinct genealogy of the word “hybrid” before it became central to the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin. As early as 1807, intellectuals challenged the idea of immutable biological forms and suggested the possibility of development as a result of changes over time. In these early writings, cultural oppositions and “contraries” were seen to make possible new forms of belief and literature (3). The collection that follows Knoepflmacher’s introduction then traces the extent to which “fragments can be reshaped into new wholes,” and is itself divided into three fragments: “Formal Hybrids,” “Discursive Hybrids,” and “Cultural Hybrids” (2). The collection achieves considerable breadth, ranging from essays on Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning to essays on W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and less canonical writers like Florence Marryat. The first section, “Formal Hybrids,” includes essays that consider the intermingling of different literary forms. C. D. Blanton’s “Arnold’s Arrhythmia” studies the relationship between Arnold’s poetry and criticism. In 1852, Arnold published Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems; the next year, he famously left out the title piece in the collection Poems: A New Edition. Whereas Arnold and others have understood this exclusion to highlight his sense of his poetry’s irrelevance, Blanton instead argues that the “disappearing poem” remains in the background of his prose (15). In place of the failed poem, Arnold offers a “hybrid of negated verse and critical prose designed to mediate the loss” (14). One outstanding essay in the first section, Christine Chaney’s “The Prophet-Poet’s Book,” presents Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as a gendered reframing of Victorian sage discourse. Chaney urges us not to see Barrett Browning’s verse-novel as a failed and fragmentary instance of either verse or novel but as a persuasive hybrid form—“a new form of persuasive truth telling in fiction” (48). On this account, Aurora Leigh is a literary self-portrait that subordinates narrative to character and image in a form that recalls Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). The second section examines an increasingly hybrid reading public and its effect on changing conceptions of authorship. Here, Jonathan Smith’s essay, “Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, and Darwin’s Botany,” suggests that John Ruskin saw the hybridity of the modern novel intertwined with evolutionary materialism. Ruskin critiques the focus of science on physical corruption; he is particularly critical of Darwin’s suggestion that so-called illegitimate crosses between plants can result in fertility. The third section features cultural hybridity and mingled identities. Ann C. Colley begins the section with her essay, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Crossings,” in which she examines Stevenson’s blurring of the line between territory and metropole. In her account, the cross-cultural exchange described in Stevenson’s Pacific Island works subverts colonial authority while complicating and changing indigenous cultural [End Page 165] practices. Colley provides a rich analysis of Stevenson’s fascination with the blending of Western and native clothing, including his tendency to dress his servants in a hybrid West-East style. In his introduction, Knoepflmacher admits that the collection is uneven in its emphasis on poetry, and it is true that the book would have benefited from a more concentrated analysis of novelistic hybridity—especially since recent scholarship has emphasized the hybrid nature of the novel and its relationship, in particular, to journalism and the periodical press. Smith suggests that the sensation novel forged a new hybrid between the gothic and the realist novel—and, other critics might argue, the discourse of news. Danielle Coriale’s essay, “Sketches by Boz, ‘So Frail...

DOMESTICITY, OBJECTS AND IDLENESS

In 1792, the Analytical Review categorised Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a work of political economy: as a contribution to a discourse whose aims, methods and directions were much contested at the time. This paper argues that the preoccupation with the objects and “manners” of domesticity across Wollstonecraft's writings provide a means of exploring her engagement with what she welcomed as the emergent “science of politics and finance”. It shows how political economy itself “begins at home”, by theorising the drive to acquisition which structures the relations between people and the objects with which they surround themselves, at home and beyond. The attempt in Wollstonecraft's Vindication to challenge the construction of Woman as object, to rethink gender and object relations, and to theorise a domestic revolution, is thus deeply involved in the critique of the larger culture of property newly consolidated in Smithian political economy. Her Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, meanwhile, continues a preoccupation with modes and styles of domesticity, to find in taste—a principle potentially polished “at home”—a means of engaging political economy more fully.

“Invisible Hands”: Paltock, Milton, and the Critique of Providence in Frankenstein

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1See Robinson, “Frankenstein Chronicles” (1.lxxvi-lxxxi) for a detailed analysis of when Mary began writing a lost, shorter ur-text, which was apparently transformed a short time later into a much longer version that resulted in the text we know of as the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. 2Rieger's edition will serve as the source for the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. All quotations from the 1816–17 MS will be from Robinson's edition of The Frankenstein Notebooks and designated as such in parenthetical citations by FN. 3For various views on Percy Shelley's role in the composition of Frankenstein, see Mellor (57–69), Leader (167–205), and Robinson's “Introduction” (24–32). None of those critics discuss emendations that are the main focus of the present article (the “invisible hand” passages and Percy's “Providentializing” of the Creature's reaction to Paradise Lost). 4See Viner for a wide-ranging intellectual history of the concept of Providence in Western culture. 5The evidence for the “invisible hand” references in Frankenstein being allusions to Adam Smith's famous description of the “invisible hand” of the free market transforming private greed into public good in The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 184–85) and The Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1.456) is not convincing. The Creature never read Smith's writings or any allusions to them. There is no mention of Smith's works in the detailed (but not exhaustive) entries and reading lists in Mary's journals. Percy Shelley's letters only mention Smith once, on February 6, 1811, when the young iconoclast, in an effort to deride his father's belief in Christian orthodoxy, characterizes the famous economist—along with Voltaire, Lord Kames, Hume, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin—as “Deists, the life of all of whom was characterized by the strictest morality” (1.50–51). Although Percy and Mary encountered allusions to The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations during pre-Frankenstein readings of William Godwin's Political Justice (1793) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) (Sunstein, 53–54; Journals 1.22, 28–37, 85; 2.649, 684), there were no references to Smith's “invisible hand” passages by either Godwin or Wollstonecraft. Mary and Percy read Paradise Lost in 1815, and Percy read the poem aloud to Mary in November of 1816, immediately before Mary began writing the Creature's narrative [Journals 1.89, 96; 146–47; 2.663; Robinson, “Frankenstein Chronology” lxxiii]).

Separations of Soul: Solitude, Biography, History

IN JUNE 1795, THE PIONEER FEMINIST Mary Wollstonecraft traveled to Scandinavia to sort out some business matters for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. She was accompanied by her one-year-old daughter, Fanny, and her maid Marguerite, but as she moved northward, they were left behind to be gathered up on the return journey. It was a wretched period in Wollstonecraft's life. Imlay, who prior to Fanny's birth had been a devoted paramour, had been seeing other women since. She clung to him desperately, as if life itself were at stake-as it had been two months earlier when, wild with misery at his betrayals, she had attempted suicide. Now, journeying through strange lands with neither lover nor child, she was wracked by the grief of abandonment. Yet, as always, the literary professional was on the qui vive, alert to possibilities. Shortly after returning to London, Wollstonecraft brought out a volume of letters addressed to an errant lover, but in fact written for publication and never sent to Imlay. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden was one of her best-received works, a favorite especially with the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who enjoyed her self-portrayal as a melancholy solitaire, a companionless voyager in a loveless world. The image of the lone woman, shorn of all intimate ties, was touching but also pleasurably outr6, a startling contrast to the familial, male-oriented feminine ideal of the late eighteenth century.' The generality of women, Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, fly from solitude as from a fearful void.2 Trained to submission, leached of inner resources, most women find aloneness intolerable. Against this, she set her own profound responses to solitude, offering up a repertoire of intense-and divided-reactions to her Scandinavian sojourn. The agonies of a forsaken heart were set against the exaltations of a mind freed from constraint. Here I am writing quite alone, she reported from Portor in Norway, after a hair-raising sea journey,

The Rhetorical Strategies of "Tumultuous Emotions:" Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden

The Rhetorical Strategies of "Tumultuous Emotions:"Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden Christine Chaney (bio) "How long will it be before we shall have read to better purpose the eloquent lessons and the yet more eloquent history of that gifted and glorious being, Mary Wollstonecraft?" William J. Fox in Westminster Review, 1831 Mary Wollstonecraft first set foot on the shore of a deserted area outside Gothenburg, Sweden during the summer of 1795 after traveling for "eleven days of weariness on board a vessel not intended for the accommodation of passengers" (63). Stepping out on that rocky coast, alone with her maid and infant daughter, she could not have known that her planned travel memoir of this unusual journey would come to exemplify quintessential elements of the emotion-laden rhetoric of self-in-text—elements not only characteristic of her early romantic age but of a newly-framed discourse of selfhood in general, with close textual affinities to both the essay and the novel. Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is a text whose literary categorization over the years—when it was noticed at all—has largely been that of an interesting and unusual travel book and not much more than that. Written at a time when interest in travel was high and travel books were well in demand, Wollstonecraft had shrewdly judged that taking along a [End Page 277] journal to record her impressions while taking a trip out of the common way would likely yield a publication that could help her allay her always-pressing debts. She was quite right. Her text was arguably the most popular and successful book she ever wrote, quickly published in a second edition and translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese (36). And while such literary success was not unusual for the time, it is striking to notice the kind of unusual reaction the Letters elicited from many of its contemporary readers. As Richard Holmes notes, "admiring references [to it] appear in the journals, poems, or correspondence of Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth and Hazlitt" (36). Even Robert Louis Stevenson "had a copy of the first edition when he went to Samoa in 1890" (36). And as we look more deeply into these contemporary references we find that this text seemed to make people care very deeply, with real "affection"—one of Wollstonecraft's own terms—about the woman Mary Wollstonecraft. Coleridge was prompted to write to her personally and offer religious solace for her sufferings after reading the Letters. The novelist Mary Hays felt she came to know Wollstonecraft "as a woman" by reading it. But even further, the language often used in communications about the Letters from Sweden is that of actual love. Robert Southey, as Holmes notes, "wrote excitedly to his publisher friend Joseph Cottle: "Have you met with Mary Wollstonecraft's [travel book]? She has made me in love with a cold climate, with frost and snow, with a northern moonlight'"(17). Since Wollstonecraft's journey took place entirely in the warm summer months, one can imagine that Southey supplied the cold northern frosts out of his own imagination and may have in fact been more in love with the author than with the "northern moonlight." Her future husband William Godwin was even more direct: "The narrative of this [Scandinavian] voyage is before the world, and perhaps a book of travels that so irresistibly seizes on the heart, never, in any other instance, found its way from the press. . . .If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration." (249) [End Page 278] Many other writers, even other women, had written popular and widely read travel books. Yet Wollstonecraft's Letters in Sweden is a striking and perhaps unique example of a travel text that prompted a Werther-like personal reaction from its readers. This unique reaction is so, I will argue here, because the...

"The Most Useful of Citizens": Towards a Romantic Literary Professionalism

How few authors or artists have arrived at eminence who have not lived by their employment? --Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark 1. Things Shall be Valued in Proportion as They are Rare THE OCTOBER 1796 EDITION OF THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE INCLUDED an alleged letter entitled Affecting Address of a poor Student. In its own way, it was an elaborate job application. Appealing Gentleman's Magazine's concern for the distressed of various descriptions, correspondent wrote in order to procure a situation in life which is not of common kind, and, therefore, not likely be obtained by common means. The source of his problems, but also basis of a potential solution, he explained, was his enthusiasm for a literary life: From a boy ... I have particularly fond of study, and love of books increases with increasing years. Unfortunately for me, my finances are too narrow enable me enjoy that learned leisure, which is peculiarly adapted my inclinations.... With a mind not uncultivated, and inclination thus ardent in pursuit of knowledge, I find myself ill-calculated undertake any servile employment in order live. His fondness for study had made him reluctant and even unable perform less elevated work, but unfortunately, it had not led any meaningful work either. Well trained but unemployed, and with his expectations raised by high cultural standards of literary domain that he had grown used inhabiting, he had become overqualified. Having [a]rrived a time of life when most men consider their destination in world as fixed, he lacked things that most adults took for granted--a home, friends, money--and remained 'little acquainted with any of various ways of procuring a subsistence. Worse than any of these hardships was indignity of his position. Had he been fairly used, there would have no necessity for me seek a maintenance by medium I now do. Neglected by a world that seemed unwilling accommodate his career in a way that reflected his well-developed sense of cultural elevation, he had reduced doing what no gentleman should ever have to--appealing in a very public way readers of Gentleman's because, being in literary department, it seems me, that one of most probable means obtain completion of my wish is make it known through medium of that Magazine which is most read by literary men. Forced by poor financial prospects, he had driven degrading point of looking for sort of work that would convert his patiently acquired cultural capital into financial capital, preferably by acting as a and secretary some nobleman, private tutor children of some gentleman of fortune, or amanuensis some literary man, who, from whatever cause, may wish for such an assistant. (1) He was, in other words, an impoverished gentleman writing more prosperous gentlemen in pages of a magazine whose very name testified inherent connection between literary taste and gentility. His sense of grievance about having denied support that would enable him continue lead a literary life did not make his intervention in Gentleman's any less conservative though. He was not denouncing hierarchical nature of a world where higher learning and upper classes had a naturally harmonious relationship, he just wanted be a part of it. Nor, he implied, was this anything more than what his years of scholarly training had led him expect. His decision publicize his concerns did not generate any solutions his problems. He finished his letter by suggesting that any potential employers--those noblemen wanting a librarian and secretary, gentlemen of fortune searching for a private tutor for their children, or literary men in need of an assistant--write Gentleman's, which could then publish a notice him in next month's edition, but none appeared. …

Fair Trade: The Language of Love and Commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Fair Trade: The Language of Love and Commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark CYNTHIA RICHARDS If we know Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, we know it largely through reputation. It is the book that won William Godwin's heart. Godwin himself endows it with this status: "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author," he writes in the Memoirs, "this appears to be the book."1 And apparently, Godwin was not alone in succumbing to its charms. As Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd note in the introduction to The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, the book "moved and haunted the leading men writers of her generation.... and several of the women too."2 Thomas Holcroft purportedly proposes after reading the Letters Written in Sweden, and although Robert Southey does not go that far, the language of his praise suggests an equally strong response: upon reading the Letters he proclaims no woman her equal and professes: "She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow with a northern moonlight."3 Thus, through reputation, this book has become a "conquest narrative," of the amorous sort, famous not so much for what it says, but for how it was received. We can't help but read the letters looking for some clue as to why Godwin fell in love (and did so, after finding Wollstonecraft rather unpleasant company upon their first meeting) and how Wollstonecraft, with apparently no calculation, managed to accomplish this considerable end. In other words, we read it looking for some power, aesthetic or perhaps 71 72 / RICHARDS purely sentimental, that transcends the particularities of its composition and which models an ideal union between writer and reader or subject and object of address. For when the reader falls in love, the text's power is figured as absolute yet non-coercive, the writer remains exposed, vulnerable even in this feat of total persuasion. The critical reception of the Letters Written in Sweden has, by and large, continued in this romantic vein. Ralph Wardle calls the Letters "Mary's most mature and most delightful book," showing "how truly charming she could be when relaxed."4 Indeed, her biographers are uniform in their praise, finding in this text the most appealing, and not incidentally the most true, representation of Wollstonecraft, "the whole person."5 Gary Kelly, in his intellectual biography Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft, speaks of this work's merits in less "intimate" terms than Wardle, but still distinguishes it for its effective synthesis of objective] and subjective] knowledge: for Kelly, the Letters bring the "arguments and experience together in one text," offering up a portrait of the "female philosopher" in her most compelling pose.6 Yet the Letters are persuasive, Mary Poovey argues, precisely because they are so seemingly without design : her plot remains largely unrevealed in the work itself, her emotional development instead taking precedence.7 As Syndy Conger succinctly explains , "There is a sense of the narrator's mind—emotion and intellection —wholly shared."8 Thus, in our expressions of admiration for this last and most successful of Wollstonecraft's "authorized" texts, we remain indebted to a language of romantic correspondence. In the Letters, we find Wollstonecraft most affecting because most unaffected, our own reactions paying implicit homage to Godwin's personal feelings about the book. Yet any discussion of this book's public reception necessarily evokes its private (and far more tragic) one. For, of course, the text has become almost as famous for being a failed conquest narrative, of the amorous sort. The letters written during this short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (both those which remained "private" and those which assumed this curious semi-personal form) we now know to have had little or no effect on their intended reader—Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft's lover and the father of her illegitimate child, Fanny. Once again, it appears we have Godwin to thank for the public perception of the text's ultimate "failure." Upon its publication, readers would certainly have...

Her Imperial Eyes: A Reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

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