[a:Ingrid Horrocks|4141134|Ingrid Horrocks|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1627263647p2/4141134.jpg] in the introduction to the [b:Broadview edition of this book|17199159|Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Broadview Editions)|Mary Wollstonecraft|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413747646l/17199159._SY75_.jpg|2479348] wrote:

A Short Residence is at once a moving epistolary travel narrative, a politically motivated ethnographical tract on the comparative treatment of women, children, and labourers, a work of scenic tourism, and a sentimental journey. (...) She [Mary Wollstonecraft] was a prolific and thoughtful reviewer of works of travel literature and, in A Short Residence, she extends her political thinking by creating a hybridized literary form, reworking the travel genre so that it absorbs and integrates a variety of discourses.

When I picked up this book, it was mostly on a whim, I just finished History of a Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland by Wollstonecraft's daughter [a:Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|11139|Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1699348762p2/11139.jpg] and I found myself really enjoying the travelogues. I knew MWS was inspired to write History of a Six Week's Tour because of her mother's A Short Residence so this really was a natural direction for me to continue in. And while I loved History of Sex Week's Tour this book simply is on entirely new level. There is so much this book contains and it was much harder reading than I expected, because yes, there are philosophical and social commentary bits.

But then, there are also emotional bits - both joyous expressing her love for her daughter Fanny, who travels with her as a toddler. But also parts that show her depression, anger and the (at this point) unrequited love she feels for Gilbert Imlay, father of her daughter. Knowing the evets of Wollstonecraft's life makes this read like a tragedy. As a reader, you know than in three years from publishing those letters, she will be dead and all the worries she expresses about the education and upbringings of her daughters will be jeopardized. You know that her beloved daughter Fanny will commit suicide at the age of 22. The read is pretty emotionally charged and I absolutely didn't see that coming.

My child was sleeping with equal calmness - innocent and sweet as the closing flowers.

This is also a book full of whimsical descriptions and beautiful nature sceneries. There is for example the playful passage where Wollstonecraft imagines herself swimming with the seals that made company to their ship before. But most of the descriptions do mirror the Romantic trends of nature loving - which doesn't make them any less beautiful.

Before i came here I could scarcely have imagined that a simple object (rocks) could have admitted of so many interesting combinations, always grand and often sublime.

I don't want to spend too much space here on the theoretical ideas that Wollstonecraft presents here. Just because that wasn't my main focus when reading and also because I feel like that's not something I could even remotely tackle in a review. So just briefly, I think it surprises no one that this book focuses a lot on women and compares their positions in different countries based on the author's experiences. But it might be more surprising how big attention pays Wollstonecraft to class and the way servants are treated. In some ways this might be a bit idealised, but I appreciated it none the less:

The treatment of servants in most countries, I grant, is very unjust, and in England, that boasted land of freedom, it is often extremely tyrannical. I have frequently, with indignation, heard gentlemen declare that they would never allow a servant to answer them; and ladies of the most exquisite sensibility, who were continually exclaiming against the cruelty of the vulgar to the brute creation, have in my presence forgot that their attendants had human feelings as well as forms. I do not know a more agreeable sight than to see servants part of a family.

She also discusses laws, capital punishment (against), prison system, prolonged courtships which I believe is a code for bigger sexual freedom for women and the existence of sea monsters in Norway. This list is obviously by no means exhaustive, but I finished this book back in summer and as I already said this isn't even an ambition I have with this review.


To wrap this up, this is one of my favourite reads of this year and one of the most surprising. As I said, I read it on a whim and had no clue what I was getting myself into. I read the Project Guttenberg edition (for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3529) but before I even finished it, I ordered the Broadview edition, because I knew I would want more of this once I finished and I was right - so a re-read of this book is in my future! If all of this sounds interesting to you, please do read it, you are not going to regret it, even though I admit that trying to pinpoint the contemporary audience for this one is hard. This book deserves to be more widely read though!


I can't figure out who is the author of the painting, but it should be a Norwegian author.

This book was wonderful. It is written as a series of letters.. more of that in a bit.

As it was published it is part travelogue, part philosophy, part social and political commentary, part personal diary and partly a memoir.
There are truly stunning, breathtaking comments about nature, this predates Wordsworth and other Romantic Poets but surely influenced them enormously. Wollstonecraft should have written poetry. She would have been amazing at this, as well as everything else she did.

While Wollstonecraft does not mention it in these published letters, she was conducting business for her beloved partner, the father of her baby, who behind her back, and in her absence, was preparing to leave her. The letters alluding more to this are in an appendix and are truly heartbreaking.

I have just read Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon a biography of Wollstonecraft and her younger daughter Mary Shelley. I think this helped me enjoy this book about Wollstonecrafts journey in Scandinavia far more.

The strange thing about this book is that in some sections the writing felt incredibly personal to me. When she talks of nature and walks she took in Norway it felt like how I would have felt, like I was there . I can’t describe it.. but this book was incredibly personal for me and I loved it.

The book is loose, rambling and unorganised but wonderful.

A few of my favourite parts:

‘Summer disappears almost before it has ripened the fruit of autumn - even, as it were, slips from your embraces whilst the satisfied senses seem to rest in satisfaction.’

Of her daughter:

‘I dread to unfold her mind lest it should make her unfit for the world she is to inhabit- Hapless woman! What fate is thine!’

And oddly prophetic for the daughter yet to be born, Mary Shelley:

‘Children peep into existence, suffer, and die; men play like moths about a candle, and sink into the flame: war, and ‘the thousand ills that flesh is heir to’, mow them down in shoals, whilst the more cruel prejudices of society palsies existence, introducing not less, though slower decay’.

4.5
Mother CAN WRITE

Read in excerpts for a global 18th century literature course- didn’t find it to be full of much substance other than her occasional personal reflections.

i can't decide if i like this woman. understand her? yeah. feel for her? yeah. but like her? .....

I really wanted to like Mary Shelley's mother's historical travel letters from Scandinavia, but I just couldn't. I finished it due to reader's guilt, pushing through on the Tube, while walking and before bed. To be honest, she read like the typical American tourist of today: arrogant, self-important and unwilling to look at others through any lens but one's own conceit.

To be fair though,, Mary Wollstonecraft had some amazing zingers and some good commentary of the problems of lust for property, social convention and justice. She also throws a harsh light on some of our cultural practices. On hospitality: "a fondness for social pleasures in which the mind not having its proportion of exercise, the bottle must be pushed about." On justice: "a man may strike a man with impunity because he pays him wages, though these wages are so low that necessity must teach them to pilfer." On thinking for oneself: "What, for example, has piety, under the heathen or Christian system, been, but a blind faith in things contrary to the principles of reason."

And finally, did Wollstonecraft write the best diss of a person, when she said of a horsesman: "Nothing, indeed, can equal the stupid obstinacy of some of these half-alive beings, who seem to have been made by Prometheus when the fire he stole from Heaven was so exhausted that he could only spare a spark to give life, not animation, to the inert clay."

Maybe I could give this book 1.5 stars...

This was such a terrible drag