3.0
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
ByPublisher Description
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLetters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark Reviews
3.0
“If you are looking to read a book for enjoyment purposes I wouldn’t say this would be it. (Or maybe it would be, I don’t know your preferences). But this book is exactly what it says, “Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark”.
If I didn’t have to read this for my uni course then I probably never would have. I’ll be honest I did find it boring, but for the sake of exploring the romanticism period I understand it. Wollstonecraft goes into detail of the nature and people of these Scandinavian countries. Her words are very reminiscent of romanticism.
I will say, this book did make me learn something new. I did not know that coffee was banned in Sweden multiple times in the 18th/19th century.”
“I mean they were just a bunch of letters written way back in the day, mostly about the landscapes of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark and the hospitality of the people who resided in those places. If I didn’t have to read it for class, I would have never picked it up and I’m honestly not sure why I had to read it to begin with. That said, it was pretty easy to follow, it was just repetitive, constantly being about nature and referring back to the previous nature that had been seen.”
“4.5/5
This book was gifted to me by a dear friend and mentor at the exact time I needed it.
First of all, I don’t ever think I have saved so many quotes and passages from a book that I relate to so deeply as I did with Wollstonecraft’s words in this collection.
The fact that the following two extracts were taken from the same spread of pages tells you everything you need to know about her genius.
“Thus do we wish as we float down the stream of life, whilst chance does more to gratify a desire of knowledge than our best-laid plans. A degree of exertion, produced by some want, more or less painful, is probably the price we must all pay for knowledge. How few authors or artists have arrived at eminence who have not lived by their employment?”
and
“Nothing can be more disgusting than the rooms and men towards the evening: breath, teeth, clothes, and furniture, all are spoilt. lt is well that the women are not very delicate, or they would only love their husbands because they were their husbands.”
She is the perfect mixture of deeply poetical and deeply savage.
Secondly, as a Danish person, it was extremely interesting to see how the cultures in Scandinavia have developed with time—especially through the lens of a feminist ahead of her time.
Thirdly and finally, she made me feel everything so brutally with every fiber of my being. From taking me through the vast wonders of Norway (that I have so desperately longed to see with my own eyes) to the raw and emotive passages that spoke to my soul. It was somehow comforting to find that another human-being from two hundred years ago could understand and experience the exact same feelings as we might struggle with today—despite a vastly different era, lifestyle, and environment.
It felt like finding a friend across time and space.”
About Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was published at the end of the 18th century, in the period of intellectual upheaval that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment. With the gradual erosion of monarchical authority (culminating with the French Revolution in 1789), and the birth of democracy, the question of the rights of men engendered lively debate — but a woman’s lot remained unconsidered. Wollstonecraft, however, was determined to change this and to add a dissenting female voice to the chorus debating political emancipation. Best known as a radical feminist, Wollstonecraft wrote about politics, history, and various aspects of philosophy in a number of different genres that included critical reviews, translations, pamphlets, and novels. With Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and other works, she also shaped the art of travel writing as a literary genre and, through her account of her journey through Scandinavia, she had an impact on the Romantic movement.
Other books by Mary Wollstonecraft
Joanna Kavenna
Joanna Kavenna grew up in various parts of Britain, and has also lived in the USA, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic States. Her first book, The Ice Museum, details her travels in the remote North. Her second is a novel called Inglorious, which won the Orange Award for New Writing. It was followed by a novel called The Birth of Love, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her latest novel is a satire called Come to the Edge. Kavenna's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian and Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator and The Telegraph, among others. She was named as one of The Telegraph's "20 Writers under 40" in 2010. She has most recently been the Writer-in-Residence at St Peter's College, Oxford.
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