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has already made her way from that rocky landing to a Lieutenant’s cottage, befriended his wife, slept in a juniper-strewn room and drunk illegal coffee. They are now in Gothenburg. Despite the frequent sadness of the book, parts of it are very funny. She’s often extravagantly rude. She is particularly preoccupied with Scandinavian teeth, regularly reporting their badness:
    The quantity of coffee, spices and other things of that kind, with want of care, almost universally spoil their teeth, which contrast but ill with their ruby lips.
    In Gothenburg she has to sit and eat for several hours, as “dish after dish is changed, in endless rotation, and handed roundwith solemn pace to each guest”. Eventually, fed to exhaustion, she begs her hosts to let her escape for a walk. “Well!” they surely tut, when she leaves the room. “Did you see how she poked at the meat? She asks
man’s
questions. No wonder she’s single.” (Wollstonecraft’s barbs on “very fat” Swedish women are still causing outrage five years later, according to the French wag de La Tocnaye in his own Scandi travel book.)
    Later, along with some thoughtful gardening tips and a rousing attack on the way Swedish people treat their servants, Wollstonecraft turns in some observations on Swedish gender politics: “The men stand up for the dignity of man,” she remarks, “by oppressing the women.” Swedish women have lives of abject drudgery, their hands crack and bleed from washing clothes in icy river water. And will the menfolk help them? Not a chance: it would “disgrace their manhood.”
    As she travels north to Strömstad, she is regularly and powerfully assaulted by the “detestable evaporations” of the local farmland fertilizer. It’s made out of “putrefying herrings”, and is so stinky that even when dining indoors – perhaps developing a profound line of thought on the perfectibility of mankind – the smell gets in, distracting and irritating her.
    And then there’s the duvet. The first ever time I read
Letters from Norway
I nearly shouted with laughter when I realized what she was talking about:
    The beds … were particularly disagreeable to me. It seemed to me that I was sinking into a grave when I entered them; for, immersed in down placed in a sort of box, I expected to be suffocated before morning.
    Mary Wollstonecraft was quite possibly the first British woman ever to sleep under a duvet. But there’s much more than mad bedding and smelly fish. There’s the Sublime, the wild beauty of Wollstonecraft’s landscapes. She’s travelling in June, marvelling at “the beauty of the northern summer’s evening and night”. There are frequent crunching gear changes, like this one, from irritation straight into contemplative awe:
    Arrived at the ferry, we were still detained; for the people who attend at the ferries have a stupid kind of sluggishness in their manner, which is very provoking when you are in haste. At present I did not feel it; for scrambling up the cliffs, my eye followed the river as it rolled between the grand rocky banks; and to complete the scenery, they were covered with firs and pines, through which the wind rustled, as if it were lulling itself to sleep with the declining sun.
    She especially loves the pines.
    I feel myself unequal to the task of conveying the beauty and elegance of the scene where the spiral tops of the pines are loaded with ripening seed and the sun gives a glow to their light-green tinge, which is changing into purple, one tree more or less advanced, contrasting with another…
    Reading this, I also feel myself unequal, in ways I struggle to explain. How, for example, can she be suicidal, yet also the most optimistic person I’ve ever met? She radiates such purpose in her writings and actions. Usefulness is a favourite word. Akey part of her philosophy is the principle of human perfectibility. And, gently mocking herself, her “favourite subject of contemplation” is nothing less