Recommendations from our site
“I once asked a friend who likes women what effect those letters would have on a man and he said they would make him run a mile. It did not work as a way of endearing herself to a scoundrel. But Godwin said the opposite, he said it made one fall in love with the reader. In any event, it was influential on travel writing and on the Romantics, the German Romantics in particular. It influenced Coleridge. She writes about being in various places in Scandinavia and being astonished at the lack of curiosity of some people when the ship approaches. She talks about the theater. It’s a travel report. You were saying earlier that she’s quite modern. The way in which travel literature has taken off in the last 50 years is extraordinary. Every newspaper, apart from recipes, has to have a huge travel section. That’s what she did when she wrote these letters.” Read more...
The Best Mary Wollstonecraft Books
Sylvana Tomaselli, Historian
“When Wollstonecraft was writing in the late 1700s, there was a widespread belief that women didn’t have the same mental capacities as men, that they weren’t suited to study things like mathematics or science or philosophy. She argued that wasn’t true—women just weren’t educated in these things. If we were all educated the same, women could participate as well as men. She’s best known as a philosopher and in particular as a feminist philosopher, but she also wrote this travel book.” Read more...
The Best Books on the Philosophy of Travel
Emily Thomas, Philosopher
