to the Letters, we find the 'real' Mary Wollstonecraft in her letters to Imlay: this would be too simplistic an idea of where our 'real selves' reside because both corpora parade a high degree of performativity and dissolve essentialist notions of subjective identity.

It is certainly part of this self-fashioning to make the reader of the Letters believe that the writer had undertaken a very long, arduous, and dangerous journey into one of the wildest and least known parts of Europe. This trick still works – for this is what you get when you look into twentieth-century secondary literature on Wollstonecraft. Margot Beard, for example, speaks of Scandinavia as 'an unusual part of Europe to visit' and 'a little known area of Europe', and Luisa Pontrandolfo of 'that long,155.

19

Ibid., p. 156.

20

Ibid., pp. 121, 122.

21

Ibid., p. 165.

22

Cf. Ibid., p. 82.

23

Ibid., p. 131.

24

Ibid., p. 66.

25

Ibid., p. 73.

26

Ibid., p. 116; cf. pp. 83–84.

27

Ibid., p. 73.

28

Ibid., pp. 132, 79–80 (emphasis added).

29

Ibid., pp. 91, 99.

30

Ibid., p. 113. Norway was then part of the kingdom of Denmark, but the language spoken there was, of course, Norwegian. Her double inability to communicate in the official language and in the language spoken by the people does not seem to have worried her in the least.

31

Martin Åberg, 'Modernity and Traditionalism: Wollstonecraft's Letters and other representations of Bohuslän', in Ryall and Sandbach-Dahlström (eds.), pp. 53–76.

32

Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, p. 85. This is one of the few passages in Wollstonecraft's Letters which indicate that she had business to pursue during her trip.

33

Cf. ibid., pp. 171–2.

34

Ibid., p. 82.

35

Ibid., pp.