European Reading Challenge #5

I read this travel narrative for the European Challenge 2024.

Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark - Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797)

In 1795, Wollstonecraft was on an unhappy uncertain romantic footing with an American businessman. He did not count his lucky stars in attracting the love of this intelligent, well-read, articulate, virtuous woman of deep imagination and feeling. She still thought enough of him to take a business trip on this behalf to these three Baltic places in order to locate a cargo of her lover’s silver.

Amazingly, she took their infant daughter with her (her first daughter Fanny Imlay, not the second one who wrote Frankenstein). Sometimes local people, though apt to see strangers as marks, were more solicitous and kind because she had a baby in tow. At one point she had to leave baby Fanny in the care of strangers for three weeks. Seeing a girl toddler clinging to her farmer father, the single mother is moved, “I was returning to my babe, who may never experience a father’s care or tenderness.  The bosom that nurtured her heaved with a pang at the thought which only an unhappy mother could feel.”

The author was a journalist so it is natural for her to talk to people to get grist for the mill of her inquisitive mind and eloquent pen. For instance, of intercultural interaction, she observes “neighbors are seldom the best friends” and concludes the dislike the Norwegians and Swedes feel for each other is based more on feelings than reason. She’s also a thinker not averse to roaming the high regions of the mind, such as when she considers which of the ingredients of “national character” might be explained by natural differences such as climate or acquired differences such as forms of government and religion. It’s interesting to follow her thinking, her quests for meaning, in the mini-essays that adorn these letters.  On the effect of poverty she observes:

The Norwegian peasantry, mostly independent, have a rough kind of frankness in their manner; but the Swedish, rendered more abject by misery, have a degree of politeness in their address which, though it may sometimes border on insincerity, is oftener the effect of a broken spirit, rather softened than degraded by wretchedness.

The writer was a romantic, prone to examining nature and her own feelings in order to compose her poetic responses to the Baltic landscapes and long summer days. Like a romantic should, she broods, “It might with propriety, perhaps, be termed the malady of genius; the cause of that characteristic melancholy which ‘grows with its growth, and strengthens with its strength.’” The romantic, the feminist, the idealist, the writer all search for sublimity:

Nothing can be stronger than the contrast which this flat country and strand afford, compared with the mountains and rocky coast I have lately dwelt so much among.  In fancy I return to a favourite spot, where I seemed to have retired from man and wretchedness; but the din of trade drags me back to all the care I left behind, when lost in sublime emotions.  Rocks aspiring towards the heavens, and, as it were, shutting out sorrow, surrounded me, whilst peace appeared to steal along the lake to calm my bosom, modulating the wind that agitated the neighbouring poplars.  Now I hear only an account of the tricks of trade, or listen to the distressful tale of some victim of ambition.

Besides romantic sublimity, she loved to think and write about the improvement of world. She’s clear-minded about weakness, ignorance, prejudice, and inertia all being barriers to the betterment of the individual and the species. Her realism - “Cassandra was not the only prophetess whose warning voice has been disregarded” - doesn’t stop her from moralizing “that even the most spontaneous sensations are more under the direction of principle than weak people are willing to allow.” She was an ardent soul, prickly, but one also gets the feeling the affair with the American cad wounded her deeply. One imagines that when she didn't look deep in intellectual pondering, she had that air of nursing a secret sorrow, an aura certain kinds of men find irresistible.

But her heart being in the right place and her need for comfort are just two elements that make us hardcore readers like and respect this gifted writer.  Ahead of her time in having the intellectual daring to kick over fences between genres, she blends politics, economics, philosophy, ethnography, travel narrative and personal observations. Like Eothen, this kind of wide-ranging travel writing feels modern.

Online: Librivox and Gutenberg Text