Stuart Curran
[Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written [..] in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), letter 25 (the last)]
[…] [B]idding adieu to Switzerland, we embarked on a boat laden with merchandize […]. The wind was violently against us, but the stream , aided by a slight exertion from the rowers, carried us on; the sun shone pleasently, S*** read aloud to us from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway, and we passed our time delightfully.
[Mary Godwin Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817)]
In the dedicatory poem to Land and Chthna (1817) / The Revolt of Island (1818) Percy Bhysse Shelley represents Mary Shelley as the offspring of “glorious parents” (1.101). The “departing glory” of the deceased Mary Wollstonecraft, ho holds, “still […] /Shine on [her]” (ll. 105-106), and from her father, William Godwin, she can “claim/The shelter […] of an immortal name” (ll. 107-108). Furthermore, in her speech, Shelley maintains, “a prophecy/ is whispered” (ll. 96-97)2.. He seems by these expressions to suggest not just that Mary Shelley inherits the distinctive talents of her two formidable writers of whom she is the offspring, but that she can be anticipated to carry on their cultural mission as well. It is not extraordinary in the circumstance of such expectations to assume that Mary would have inculcated them as well. Frankenstein (1818), published anonymously mere weeks after these dedicatory stanzas were first printed, is not just dedicated to Godwin but is a novel, as the contemporary attack by John Wilson Crocker in the Quarterly Review noted, manifestly influenced by him [CROCKER 1818, p.382]. Crocker was asserting a persuasive emotional instability as characterizing the novel, but a more objective modern perspective would identify the principal traits of a Godwinian novel as a remarkably, even brilliantly, recast by Mary in her own : an obsessive male protagonist locked in an adversial relationship, as in Caleb Williams, ; the juxtaposition of various cultures in an international setting, as in St.Leon and in Fleetwood ; victimized innocence; multiple levels of social injustice; stratified subplots thematically interlinked; a barely concelead intellectual and political agenda. I have argued elsewhere [CURRAN 2003, p. 112-114] that the absence of a similar reflection of Wollstonecraft in Frankenstein should not be read as Mary’s turning her back on her mother’s legacy, for her second novel, Valperga, is a deeply informed by her mother’s ideas and personality traits as Frankenstein is reflective of her father’s largest concerns as a novelist. In the Countess of Valperga, Euthanasia dei Adimari, Mary recreates her mother as far-sighted feminist philosopher and philanthropist; In Beatrice of Ferrara, Wollstonecraft’s intense but ultimately dangerous sensibility is exposed and sympathetically interrogated. Once again we encounter the Godwinian obsessive in the male protagonist, Castruccio Castracani, whom Mary depicts as at once attractive to and destructive of his powerless female counterparts. By the time she turns to her third novel, The Last Man, Mary Shelley, as has long been understood, changes the calibration of her biographical context, embedding herself, her deceased husband, and Lord Byron among her cast of characters. Imaginatively recreating the familial and intellectual cross-currents in which she lived thus seems like a means that the young Mary Shelley used to find her own voice in the midst of the stimulating but daunting artistic milieu in which she was enveloped while yet an adolescent. It may be also seem enacting a personal and artistic tribute to the strong forces from which she garnered her own sense of creativity. I would like to argue here that the same fundamental operations can be discerned in her first publication , A History of a Six Weeks’ Tour’ , where she both incorporates the interests of her parents and enlists the writings of her lover Shelley so as to enlarge the replication to include the extended family that will carry the Godwin-Wollstonecraft legacy into a second generation. Since that unique incorporation of family values within four writers who paradoxically each spurned conventional marriage ties is the essential understanding behind WIlliam St. Clair’s biographical and cultural representation of the joint family enterprise he conceives as operating under his rubric of The Godwins and the Shelleys (1989), as well as the thrust of Julie Carlson’s more recent critical exposition of the familial interplay, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft , William Godwin, Mary Shelley (2007), this essay will attempt to demonstrate that the concentration on a scrupulous incorporation of her parents’ shared intellectual concerns is as much an aspect of Mary’s first publication as of her later and more mature fictional realizations. Although Maty Wollstonecraft’s voice is the one that resonates most forcefully through the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, it is notable that Godwin had used the destination to which the young travelers twice bend their course in two of the novels he wrote during the infancy and childhood of his daughter. In St. Leon (1799) Switzerland is the refuge to which Marguerite St. Leon, Godwin’s apparent idealization of Mary Wollstonecraft shortly after her death , conducts her family after her husband’s addiction to gambling has brought them to ruin in Paris. Although a freak storm eventually destroys the family cottage in the canton of Solothurn in the northwestern part of Swtzerland, the pastorall Idyll they enjoy there while St. Leon recovers from his deep and protracted depression seems a prototype for the similar modest retreat inhabited by the De Lacey family in Frankestein. In St. Leon the Swiss, though free, are decidely unwelcoming, and the indigent family is forced to move to Germany. In Godwin’s next novel, Fleetwood (1805) , the accents shift radically, and here is where one feels the true import of Godwin’s settings for the young travelers. The oldest friend of Casimir Fleetwood’s father, a Swiss named Ruffigny, lives a truly idyllic life in a simple cottage, sorrounded by natural beauty but also ( the certain Godwin touch) possesed of an ample library, in south central Switzerland, near Mt. St. Gothard in the canton of Uri. When the dissipated son finally staggers out of Paris to pursue his father’s Injunction to become acquainted with the sage Ruffigny , he recounts that “the very air of this country- the country of freedom, of indipendence, moderation and good sense- had a favourable effect on my temper” [GODWIN 1992, p.66 ]. The day after they meet, Ruffigny conducts the young Fleetwood on a tour of the Lake of Uri (actually, an arm of Lake Lucerne), where in this most romantic setting he divulges to him the death of his neglected father during Fleetwood’s months of libertinism in Paris. Lake Lucerne is the farthest point reached by Mary, CLaire and Shelley in their travels: “we resolved to journey towards the lake of Uri, and seek in that romantic and interesting country some cottage where we might dwell in peace and solitude” [SHELLEY, M. 1817, p.45]. What in the present context is most interesting, however, is not just the notion of a tranquil cottage among the Swiss mountains, but the details of the landscape noted on both these tours. Ruffigny, for istance, points out to Fleetwood a chapel erected to commemorate the escape of WIlliam Tell from the hands of the tyrannical Gesler [GODWIN 1992 , pp. 71-72]; and when Mary Shelley’s party reaches the sight she also duly takes note of this chapel .[SHELLEY, M. 1817, p. 49]3. But they are unimpressed with the descendants of that illustrious man: ” this lovely lake, these sublime mountains, and wild forests, seemed a fit cradle for a mind aspiring to high adventure and heroic deeds. Yet we saw no glimpse of his spirit in the countrymen” [Ibid., p. 50]. In contrast, Ruffigny, with his limited wants and mature distaste for “high adventure”, finds in this retreat a total sufficiency. The young party, indeed, Mary recounts,was unable to find more than one person who spoke french in the vicinity and, running out of money, at this point they aborted their trip. The fame of William Tell, of course, would have been enough to have drawn any tourist to this location, but the particular terminology of Godwin’s paean to the setting as redolent of peaceful liberty and a romanticized self-sufficiency could well have proved the essential guidebook for this endeavor. But if Godwin may have authorized this group with a politicized geography, it was Wollstonecraft who seems to have taught them what to notice in their travels. Only toward the end of her narrative in Letters Written […] in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) does Wollstonecraft find herself in an urban setting, Copenhagen; otherwise, she roams the countryside, interrelating with small numbers of its scattered denizens and continually responding to their society, as well as to the majesty of mountain and ocean views. She enacts the role of a world citizens, discoursing freely on comparative customs, mores, political systems, as if there were no war being waged to the south, nor a system of censorship in place in Britain by which to regulate her expression. Carriying her infant Fanny with her, she is highly consciuos of being a woman, but she is quite aware that she is not like the women she encounters on her travels : in her first letter she remarks , ” At supper my host told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation, for I asked him men’s questions ” [ WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p. 248]. Above all, Wollstonecraft avoids the conventional expectations of travel writing, eschewing the agenda of architectural sights, churches, galleries, piazzas and other such fashionable gathering-places or obvious experiences. She travels through Scandinavia on a voyage of personal discovery, as if it were terra incognita and no one had ever preceded her to chart its particularities. Clearly, the young travelers of twenty years later cannot hope to equal the remarkable sense of indipendence and authority embodied in Wollstonecraft’s voice; but in essential ways they replicate the nature of her reportage. Also, as Mary Shelley prepared her History, perhaps feeling the necessity of enlarging upon his brevity, she doubled its original length by printing four lengthly letters – two of her own and two of Shelley’s – frome the secondo expedition into Switzerland of two years later. The result is to shift from the initial third person-person narrative voice lodged in the past tense to a realization of something akin to Wollstonecraft’s epistolary immediacy, and explicitly to incorporate both female and male points of engagement with their surroundings. Wollstonecraft’s mental framework is immediately evident from Mary Shelley’s account of the inn at Boulogne in which they stayed the first night, where she is much taken by the femme de chambre’s making a joke about how they are being overcharged for their horses.
This made us for the first time remark the difference which exists between this class of persons in France and in England. In the latter country they are prudish, and if they become in the least degree familiar they are imprudent. The lower orders in France have the easiness and politeness of the most well-bred English; they treat you unaffectedly as their equal, and consequently there is no scope for insolence. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, p.9]
This observation is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s celebration of the Norwegians after her immersion in the still feudal structures of Swedish society:
The distribution of landed property into small farms, produces a degree of equality which I have seldom seen elsewhere. […] You will be surprised to hear me talk of liberty; yet the norwegians appear to me to be the most free community I have ever observed. [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p.273]
Two years later Mary Shelley is again attracted to the absence of class markers she encounters in Genova .
There is more equality of classes here that in England. This occasions a greater freedom and refinement of manners among the lower orders than we meet with in our own country. I fancy the haughty Englishladies are greatly disgusted with this consequence of republican institution, for the Genevese servants complain very much of their scolding, an exercise of the tongue. I believe, perfectly unknown here. The peasants of Switzerland may not however emulate the vivacity and grace of the French. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, p. 103-104]
Although the History is not explicitly set to turn the conventions of travel narrative upon their head, as, for istance, Lady Morgan does in her nearly comtemporary France (1817), the first chapter of which is entitled “Peasantry”, Mary’s preoccupation with the well-being of the common people reflects the republican biases of her mother (and, of course, the upbringing of her father as well). She also has an eye for the liminality through which Wollstonecraft structures her Letters.
Behold us now in Norway; and I could not avoid feeling susprise at observing the difference in the manners of the inhabitants of the two sides of the river; for every thing shews taht the norwegians are more industrious and more opulent. [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p. 266]
This difference Wollstonecraft attributes to the political cultures that distinguish the two countries. In her opening letter, upon arrival in Sweden, her first observation is that “Despotism, as is actually the case, I found had here cramped the industry of man” [ Ibid., p.243], and at the border she returns to this explanation:
A people have been characterized as stupid by nature; what a paradox! Because the did not consider that slaves, having no object to stimulate the industry, have not their faculties sharpened by the only thing that can exercise them, self-interest. [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p.266]
Mary Shelley, passing from France to Switzerland, suppresses the political implications of the distinctions she notes, though perhaps she does so because her English readers would find them an obvious correlative to differences in religion :
On passing the French barrier, a surprising difference may be observed between the opposite nations that inhabit either side. The Swiss cottages are much cleaner and neater, and the inhabitants exhibit the same contrast. The Swiss women weara great deal of white linen, and their whole dress is always perfectly clean. THis superior cleanliness is chiefly produced by the difference of religion : travellers in Germany remark the same contrast between the protestant and catholic towns, although they be but a few leagues separate. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, pp.40-41]
The freedom with which Mary Shelley expresses her sympathy for a republican politics is another aspect of her reportage that reflects the voice of her mother, who found the Norwegians so enamored of the values of the French revolution that she “could hardly persuade them that Robespierre was a monster” [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p. 302]. As Mary, Claire and Shelley traverse France in the summer of 1814, they encounter town after town in ruins, leveled by the Russians (as that point publicly esteemed allies of Great Britain against Napoleonic France), whose czar, Alexander I, after Napoleon’s initial defeat this same year, was feted with a grear fireworks display by the Prince Regent in London. “Nothing could be more entire than the ruin which these barbarians had spread as they advanced”, Mary observes :
[T]he distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed, and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war, which none can feel who have not travelled through a country pillaged and wasted by this plague, which, in his pride, man inflict upon his fellow. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, p. 19]
Two years later, as Mary describes Geneva in the first of her letters, she finds only one sight that she opines “can repay you for the trouble of walking over its rough stones […] a small obelisk […] erected to the glory of Rousseau”, and she goes on to applaud
[…] that revolution, which his writings mainly contributed to mature, and which, notwithstanding the temporary bloodshed and injustice with which it was polluted, has produced enduring benefilts to mankind, which all the chicanery of statesmen, nor even the great cospiracy of kings, can entirely render vain. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, pp. 101-102]
That rhetoric, published when the author was but twenty, it might be said bears the true flair of Mary Wollstonecraft. The “conspiracy of kings” is Mary Shelley’s version of the Holy Alliance, Alexander I’s league of sanctimonious autocrats who in 1815 had reinstalled themselves across the breadth of Europe at the Congress of Vienna. Wollstonecraft’s major impact on Mary Shelley’s History, however, lies within the representation of nature. Her particular forte is making the interplay of aestethic effects, in which again and again, contrary to the highly gendered formulations of eighteeenth- century aesthetics, as a woman she delights in forcing the sublime upon the beautiful. In her first letter, having landed in Sweden, she undertakes an excursion with her host to visit an English-speaking neighbor :
I walked on, still delighted with the rude beauties of the scene: for the sublime often gave place imperfectibly to the beautiful, dilating the emotions which were painfully concentrated. [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p. 247]
Later, visinting a house near Gothenburg, her observation of the scenery shifts back and forth across its contrasting aesthetic effects:
It was close to the lake embosomed in pine clad rocks. In one part of the meadows, your eye was directed to the broad expanse; in another, you were led into a shade, to see a part of it, in the form of a river, rush amongst the fragments of rocks and roots of trees; nothing seemed forced. One recess , particularly grand and solemn, amongst the towering cliffs, had a rude stone table, and seat, placed in it, that might have served for a druid’s haunt; whilst a placid stream below enlivened the plowers on its margin, where light-footed elves would gladly have danced their airy rounds. [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, pp. 256-257]
Mary Shelley strives for a like merging of extremes. Arriving at Brunnen on the northern end of the Lake of Uri, she writes that her party “remained until late in the evening on the shores of the lake conversing, enjoying the rising breeze, and contemplating with feelingd of exquisite delight the divine objects that surrounded us” [SHELLEY, M. 1817, pp.50-51]. The day following, the rising breeze had become a tempest :
Afurious vent d’ Italie (south wind) tore up the lake, making immense waves and carrying the water in a whirlwind high in the air, when it fell like heavy rain into the lake. The waves broke with a tremendous noise on the rocky shores. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, p. 51]
At times, Mary Wollstonecraft reaches for even more complex effects, suggesting just how studied are combinations for overlaid and contrasting aesthetic registers. Here she is traversing a road toward Quistram, in southern Sweden, as th sun begins to set :
The road was on the declivity of a rocky mountain, slightly covered with a mossy herbage and vagrant firs. At the bottom, a river, straggling amongst the recesses of a stone, was hastening forward to the ocean and its grey rocks, of which we had a prospect on the left, whilst on the right it stole peacefully forward into the meadows, losing itself in a thickly wooded rising ground. As we drew near, the loveliest banks of wild flowers variegated the prospect, and promised to exhale odours to add to the purity of the air, the purity of which you could almost see, alas! not smell, for the putrefying herrings, which they use as manure, after the oil has been extracted, spread over the patches of earth, claimed by cultivation, destroyed every other. [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p.261]
Mary Shelley in 1814 is not quite up to this sophisticated interweaving of conflicting sensations, but she certainly seems to reach for an equivalent texturing of elements as her group descends the Rhine.
Most of our companions chose to remain in the cabin; this was fortunate for us, since nothing could be more horribly disgusting than the lower order of smoking, drinking Germans who travelled with us; they swaggered and talked, and what was hideous to English eyes, kissed one another. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, pp. 67-68]
Against the vulgarity of the human element, she juxtaposes the Rhine as afterward represented by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, who there likewise structures his entire canto around contrasting episodes of the sublime and beautiful:
We were carried down by a dangerously rapid current, and saw on either side of us hills covered with vines and trees, craggy cliffs crowned by desolate towersm and wooded island, where picturesque ruins peeped from behind the foliage, and cast the shadows of their form on the troubled waters, which distorted without deforming them. We heard the songs of the vintagers, and if surrounded by disgusting Germans, the sight was not so replete with enjoyment as I now fancy it to have been […] [SHELLEY, M. 1817, p. 69]
Two years later, in the letters from the environs of Genova added to her History, Mary Shelley seems to have schooled herself even more closely upon her mother’s model 4. This time the party crosses the mountainous French-Swiss border in early spring with “snow pelting against the windows of our carriage.”
The prospect around, however, was sufficiently sublime to command our attention – never was scene more awfully desolate […]; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock -encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime. […] To what a different scene are we now arrived! To the warm sunshine and to the humming of sun-loving insects. From the windows of our hotel we see the lovely lake, blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams. The opposite shore it sloping, and covered with vines, which however do not so early in the season add to the beauty of the prospect. Gentlemen’s seats are scattered over these banks, behind which rise the various ridges of black mountains, and towering far above, in the midst of its snowy Alps, the majestic Mont Blanc, highest and queen of all. [SHELLEY, M. 1817, pp. 93,94]
Mary Shelley accomplishes a richly complicates stratification in these two adjoining paragraphs, moving from a mountainous winter wilderness that can scarcely be seen in the midst of a blizzard to the immediacy of a sundrenched prospect marked by humming insects, and then across a retreating landscape that moves imperceptibly from the beautiful region of Lake of Geneva across miles of rolling countryside to the reestablishment of the sublime at the limits of perception. At this description should suggest, in the present context Mary Shelley’s later additions tot the account of the original six-weeks’ tour are carefully designed and seem even more fully than the descriptios of the first tour to represent a continuation of the model provided her in Mary Wollstonecraft’s landscapes. This is so – even, it might be said, all the more so – as she absorbs two of Percy Bhysse Shelley’s letters to Thomas Love Peacock into her own narrative. The first recounts the tour of Lake Geneva conducted by Shelley and Byron in late June and early July, whose central object is to visit scenes associated with Rousseau and with the masterpiece of sensibility fiction he set within this countryside, Julie; ou la nouvelle Héloise. Both as landscape and as fictional setting, in other words, Shelley’s letter, when reclaimed to this context, presents its readers with a tour that is concentrated on the very quintessence of the beautiful – with all rough edges, violent impulses, dangerous passions muted into exquisite fine feeling. Shelley’s letter also continually reveals him in the posture of rereading Rousseau’s novel as he tours, an immediate translation of experience into its secondary representation, which is something of a cameo perspective of the very operation that Mary Shelley is endeavoring to encapsulate within her travel account. This immersion in the beautiful is followed by the last letter in the History, detailing th party’s tour to Chamouni and Mont Blanc, which is to say, from the safe comforts of the beautiful – “From Bonneville to Cluses the road conducts through a spacious and fertile plain, surrounded on all sides by mountains, covered like those of Mellerie [ Julie’s setting recounted in the previous letter] with forests of intermingled pine and chesnut” to the dangerous and forbidding sublime breached in the ensuing sentence – “At cluses the road turns suddenly to the right, following the Arve along the chasm which it seems to have hollowed for itself among the perpendicular mountains” [Letter IV in SHELLEY, M. 1817, pp. 143-144]. From here Shelley recounts the expeditions of successive days in the region of Mont Blanc, then up to the glacier of Montanvert, known as the Mer de Glance, or Sea of Ice, over which towers Mont Blanc. The letter ( and History ) ends with an artful and characteristically Shelleyan careen into the gothic where the perilous sublime is invested with a literal physicality that suddenly embraces the original tour within its Genova extension.
Did I tell that there are troopsof wolves among the mountains? In the winter they descend into the vallies, which the snow occupies six months of the year, and devour every thing that they can find out of doors. A wolf is more powerful than the fiercest and strongest dog. There are no bears in these regions. We heard, when we were at Lucerne, that they wew occasionally found in the forests which surround that lake. Adieu. [Letter IV in SHELLEY, M. 1817, p. 172]
This last touch seems the final verdict on the peace and safety of Ruffigny’s romanticized Swiss retreat which had been the magnet drawing the earlier party in their journey eastward. But the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour does not actually end here. By now it should be clear what is in Mary and Shelley’s mind in their decision to insert Shelley’s first total poetic masterpieces as refined coda to their travelog . “Mont Blanc” concludes the volume in a meditation on the process by which the mind interacts with the landscape around it and by extension with nature. Such a self-reflexive operation also impelled Mary Wollstonecraft’s meditation on nature in the Letters:
Nature is a nurse of sentiment, – the true source of taste; – yet what misery, as well as rapture, is produced by a quick perception of the beautiful and sublime, when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy and the harmonized soul sinks into melancholy , or rises to extasy, just as the chords are touched, like the aeolian harp agitated by the changing wind.[WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989. p. 271]
Wollstonecraft’s notion of perception, however, like her metaphor of the Aeolian Harp, sounds more like its usage by Coleridge in the earlier generation of Romanticism than it resembles Shelley’s exploration. The response to nature in “Mont Blanc” is anything but a passive reception of its beautiful and sublime impulses. It is rather an active, even aggressive, attempt to arrive at the point where the mind can underatand with what it is actually interacting, to effect a grappling with a reality that is substantial, palpable. That Shelley, as his five stanzas figuratively ascend the mountain, is unable at any point to achieve this assurance is actually the point of a poem that ends with an unanswered question. The process, however, throws the entire discourse back o the essential power, the unquestionable centrality, of the imagination. However, the different may be Mary Wollstonecraft’s perspective on how the mind interacts with the natural environment, she is so less certain that in this interaction she can define the operations of her imagination:
How often do my feelings produce ideas that remind me of the origin of many poetic fictions. In solitude, the imagination bodies forth its conception unrestrained, and stops enraptured to adore the beings of its own creation. These are moments of bliss; and the memory recals them with delight. [WOLLSTONECRAFT 1989, p. 286]
The presence of “Mont Blanc” at the end of A History of a Six Weeks’ Tour enacts a strong retrospective conterthrust. We are asked to return through the recollection of these two different voices with which toward the end the discourse is enlarged, and to recognize in this self-reflexive impulse that we have not been simply offered a reporter’s perspective on the surrounding scene. Rather, and very much in the guiding spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written […] in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, we are asked to recreate the experience as an imaginative interplay, one that, in the disparity of voice that marks the two different years’ account, testifies to a growth of command, an enrichment of mental power. We may also see in this display, a self-conscious absorption of Mary Shelley’s long-dead mother into her living imagination.
[1] Betty Bennett and I, aside from our long friendship, collaborated in organizing international conferences for the bicentenaries of both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bhysse Shelley and in publishing the results. I have sought in this essay to replicate this notion of a collaborative venture as a memorial to this warm friend and enduring scholar.[2] SHELLEY, P. B. 2002, p.104[3] Since the text of the History in volume 8 of the 1996 Pickering edition of The Novels and Selected Writings of Mary Shelley omits the final two letters, presumably because they are authored by another hand, I quote from the original 1817 edition. The present essay, needless to say, is an argument for the integrity of the 1817 text.[4] Betty T. Bennett has established form responsive letters that MAru Godwin actualli addressed versions of these two missives to her step-sister Fanny Imlay [BENNETT 1980, p. 19, n. 1]. Since Fanny Imlay was the infant who traveled with Mary Wollstonecraft through Scandinavia, Mary could not but have had her mother sharply in mind as she wrote.
Bibliography
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WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. (1989 [1796]) : Letters Written […] in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Todd, J. and Butler , M., eds., vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, London, Pickering.