<P> Connecting the work to Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), he celebrates its sensibility and "eroticizes the condition of feminine sorrow"; for Godwin, the work was an epistolary romance, not a work of political commentary . After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, Godwin published her original letters to Imlay (destroying the originals in the process). He deleted all references to contemporary political events and her business negotiations, emphasizing the romantic connection between the two sets of letters . Favret contends that Godwin wanted the public to see Wollstonecraft's affair as a sentimental romance akin to that between Charlotte and Werther in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). </P> <P> For a woman, a one - year - old child, and a maid to travel to Scandinavia without the protection of a man was unprecedented in the eighteenth century . The book resulting from the trip also seemed highly unusual to readers at the time: details of Wollstonecraft's travels to a rarely visited area of the world, what one editor of the Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark describes as "a boreal wilderness", intrigued and even shocked contemporary readers . The unorthodox theology of the book also alienated some readers . The Monthly Magazine and American Review wrote: </P> <P> (She) discarded all faith in christianity . (sic)... From this period she adored (God)... not as one whose interposing power is ever silently at work on the grand theatre of human affairs, causing eventual good to spring from present evil, and permitting nothing but for wise and benevolent purposes; but merely as the first great cause and vital spring of existence . </P> <P> Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark retreated from Wollstonecraft's earlier focus on God as judge to God as mere creator, shocking some conservative readers who were not prepared to accept anything akin to deism . Worried more about Wollstonecraft's promotion of sensibility, fellow feminist and author Mary Hays criticized the book's mawkishness . A professor of moral philosophy, Thomas Brown, published a poetic response to the book, The Wanderer in Norway (1816). Rather than rejoicing in the freedom that Wollstonecraft argued the connection between nature and emotion offered, however, Brown represented her work as a failure and Wollstonecraft as a tragic victim . He read the book as a cautionary tale, whereas Wollstonecraft had intended it as a description of the possibilities of social and personal reform . As Favret argues, almost all of the responses to Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark placed the narrator / Mary in the position of a sentimental heroine, while the text itself, with its fusion of sensibility and politics, actually does much to challenge that image . </P>

Letters written in sweden norway and denmark analysis