ABSTRACT
Literary women from Christine de Pizan to her present-day sisters have always been aware of their special situation in patriarchal European culture and of the complex nature of gender and women’s experience in the world. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 –97) and her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), the memoir and last work she fi nished and published during her lifetime, are no exception.1 A travel book taking the form of a series of 25 letters addressed to her lover, the American merchant Gilbert Imlay, the confessional Letters Written During A Short Residence o er a new vision of the Northern Other, a fact that cannot be underestimated in cultural terms.2 The book was swiftly translated into a variety of other European languages, appearing in German as the Briefe, geschrieben während eines kurzen Aufenthaltes in Schweden, Norwegen und Dänemark (Hamburg, 1796), in Swedish as the Bref, skrifna under et kort wistande i Swerige, Norrige och Danmark, af Maria Wollstoncraft, öfwersatte från engelskan (Stockholm, 1798), and in Dutch as the Brieven geschreven geduurende eene reize door Zweeden, Noorwegen en Deenmarken (Haarlem, 1799).3
