2025

Reuter, Martina

In 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft travelled to the Nordic countries and Germany, a journey that would result in her most famous book Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Letters evoked interest in the countries she visited and this chapter shows that Wollstonecraft’s thought was first introduced in Swedish by a review of Letters published in Åbo Tidningar in 1797. The newspaper presents Wollstonecraft as a female philosopher whose thought and person are of interest to female as well as male readers. The newspaper follows up its interest in Wollstonecraft with an obituary in 1798 and a biographical essay in 1831. The chapter studies all three texts, compares them with some contemporary British and German texts, and argues that the early Swedish reception of Wollstonecraft embraced her radicalism to a greater extent than the early German and Danish receptions. The biographical essay published in 1831 is politically more cautious than the early texts, but did in its own context present the agency of a female philosopher at a time that was a lacuna between the era of the French revolution and the rise of the organised women’s movement in the second half of the 19th century.