Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

London: printed for J. Johnson,, 1796. A model for travel literature and the Romantic movement First edition of the author's curious travelogue, a nuanced epistolary series regarded by many as the first English-language account by a woman travelling on business. It was her most popular lifetime work; Swedish, Dutch, and Portuguese translations appeared in 1798, 1799, and 1806 respectively. Wollstonecraft, accompanied by her infant daughter and a maid, travelled to Scandinavia during the summer of 1795. She was tasked, as the agent for her partner Gilbert Imlay, with negotiating compensation for the loss of valuable cargo supposedly swindled from Imlay by a Norwegian ship captain. The resulting 25 letters combine autobiographical details with observations on sociology, national character, education, and the relationship between reason and imagination. They are "a fascinating mixture of autobiography and travel writing, often leaving readers with the impression that the places Wollstonecraft visits and the people she encounters are only secondary in importance to the traveller's own experiences, and that her journey is one of personal progress rather than one of geographical and social exploration" (Radu, p. 267). "When Johnson published the Letters they found an enthusiastic public, not least among young poets. The wording of Wollstonecraft's description of the waterfalls she visited at Frederikstad and Trollhätten appears to have played a part in inspiring Coleridge's description of the sacred river Xanadu; and the theme of the book - a solitary traveller wandering through wild, rugged and remote places, and suffering from the absence and indifference of a lover - helped to set a fashion for questing romantic journeys. Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley and Mary's as yet unborn daughter Mary, who sends her Frankenstein north at the end of his story, all read and followed in Mary Wollstonecraft's footsteps" (Tomalin, p. 228). Octavo (214 x 126 mm). Contemporary tree calf, rebacked to style, smooth spine divided into six compartments with decorative gilt bands, red morocco label, covers bordered in blind. Bound without the final publisher's advertisement leaf. Corners and covers worn in places, endpapers and first and last leaves browned from turn-ins and a little spotted, contents otherwise crisp and clean. A very good copy. ESTC T38577; Rothschild 2598; Windle A7a. Anca-Raluca Radu, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)", in Barbara Schaff, ed., Handbook of British Travel Writing, 2020; Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1992.