ABSTRACT
In Letters from Sweden, readers are treated to a fine display of feminine secrecy. Invited into the book by the apparently open advertisement, they are not invited to become acquainted with the book's context, its background, its genesis. This is the specifics of the affair with Imlay, unknown to the public until the year after Wollstonecraft's death, when Godwin published his Memoirs and the private letters to Imlay, thus displaying her all naked to her public. Many critics have noted the power of the emotional secrecy in Letters from Sweden. According to Richard Holmes in his introduction to the work, it gives Wollstonecraft's travels their "urgency, their sense of a mysterious, almost nightm are pursuit." Wollstonecraft had by now read enough contemporary travel books to understand the style. She knew that too much minute description like Gilpin's could be boring and that detailed topographical accounts would not bring in her browsing reader.
