"Long regarded as Mary Wollstonecraft's most delightful work, this series of twenty-five letters is quite possibly the perfect fusion of their famous author's personal and intellectual selves. The letters were written to her lover, Gilbert Imlay, who had sent her to the Scandinavian countries as his business envoy dur-ing the summer of 1795. She was accompanied by her year-old daughter and a nursemaid on part of the journey, but frequently took side trips on her own. Informed by a wealth of ideas and years of wide reading, the letters combine landscape description, sociological observation, poetic reverie, and personal apostrophe. Never ceasing to observe the members of her own sex, Wollstonecraft is concerned with the plight of Scandinavian women, and expresses her views on child care. The modern reader will be struck by the contemporaneity of her comments on prison reform, capital punishment, property, and government."--Cover.

Includes bibliographical references (pages xxiii-xxiv).

Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was written in 1796 after Wollstoncraft's return to England from a Scandinavian business trip taken on behalf of her lover Gilbert Imlay. It is a combination of travel writing, memoir, and philosophy based on journal entries and letters from the trip and includes observations on the conditions facing women in the countries visited.

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