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...