ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft's journey to Scandinavia in 1795 began in the midst of despair. Ostensibly, she sought to help her estranged lover, the American businessman Gilbert Imlay, recover money lost in his effort to profit from breaking the British blockade against France. The journey that Wollstonecraft recounts in the twenty-five letters of her 1796 travel narrative Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark is an attempt to heal her emotional pain and melancholia while traveling through picturesque, sublime, and beautiful landscapes. Wollstonecraft's representation of picturesque journeys as therapeutic emerged within the context of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of health travel in England, when physicians recommended that members of the upper classes take excursions to cure their nervous illnesses. For Wollstonecraft and others, the physical motion of perambulating and riding through the fluctuating landscape closely connects the practices of picturesque travel to the medically prescribed journey through changing scenes.
