Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

Wollstonecraft was prompted to publish Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark because she was heavily in debt. The successful sales of this, her most popular book in the 1790s, came at an opportune moment. Well-received by reviewers, the work was translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese; published in America; and reissued in a second edition in 1802.

Amelia Alderson praised the work, separating the philosopher from the woman: "As soon as I read your Letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher had excited was lost in the tender sympathy call'd forth by the woman." William Godwin, Wollstonecraft's future husband, wrote in his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that reading Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark caused him to fall in love with Wollstonecraft:

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. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment.

Connecting the work to Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), he celebrates its sensibility and "eroticizes the condition of feminine sorrow"; for Godwin, the work was an epistolary romance, not a work of political commentary. After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, Godwin published her original letters to Imlay (destroying the originals in the process). He deleted all references to contemporary political events and her business negotiations, emphasizing the romantic connection between the two sets of letters. Favret contends that Godwin wanted the public to see Wollstonecraft's affair as a sentimental romance akin to that between Charlotte and Werther in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

For a woman, a one-year-old child, and a maid to travel to Scandinavia without the protection of a man was unprecedented in the eighteenth century. The book resulting from the trip also seemed highly unusual to readers at the time: details of Wollstonecraft's travels to a rarely visited area of the world, what one editor of the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark describes as "a boreal wilderness", intrigued and even shocked contemporary readers. The unorthodox theology of the book also alienated some readers. The Monthly Magazine and American Review wrote:

discarded all faith in christianity. ... From this period she adored ... not as one whose interposing power is ever silently at work on the grand theatre of human affairs, causing eventual good to spring from present evil, and permitting nothing but for wise and benevolent purposes; but merely as the first great cause and vital spring of existence.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark retreated from Wollstonecraft's earlier focus on God as judge to God as mere creator, shocking some conservative readers who were not prepared to accept anything akin to deism. Worried more about Wollstonecraft's promotion of sensibility, fellow feminist and author Mary Hays criticized the book's mawkishness. A professor of moral philosophy, Thomas Brown, published a poetic response to the book, The Wanderer in Norway (1816). Rather than rejoicing in the freedom that Wollstonecraft argued the connection between nature and emotion offered, however, Brown represented her work as a failure and Wollstonecraft as a tragic victim. He read the book as a cautionary tale, whereas Wollstonecraft had intended it as a description of the possibilities of social and personal reform. As Favret argues, almost all of the responses to Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark placed the narrator/Mary in the position of a sentimental heroine, while the text itself, with its fusion of sensibility and politics, actually does much to challenge that image.

After the publication of Godwin's Memoirs, which revealed and endorsed Wollstonecraft's love affairs and illegitimate child, her works were scorned by the majority of the public. Nevertheless, "the book was to arouse a passion for travel among cultivated people in Europe". Intrepid nineteenth-century British female travel writers such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley still read it and were inspired by Wollstonecraft's pioneering efforts. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was republished at the end of the nineteenth century and Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, took a copy on his trip to Samoa in 1890.

Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was a powerful influence on Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley. In 1817, Shelley would publish History of a Six Weeks' Tour, a narrative of her travels through Europe and to Lake Geneva which was modeled after her mother's work.