His son, Mary Wollstonecraft’s father, moved his family first to Epping Forest and then Barking in a doomed attempt at being a gentleman farmer. Grandpa Wollstonecraft was a well-to-do handkerchief maker, but his wealth was gradually squandered. She was born in Spitalfields, in a house on Primrose Street that has long since been demolished, the second of seven kids in a downwardly-mobile family. Mary Wollstonecraft was also the punk of the British Enlightenment, a fearless advocate of human rights and a daredevil in her personal life. Wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears” (VRM 5:76).Somewhere beneath the shiny corporate blocks of Liverpool Street is the birthplace of the foremother of feminism. Too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. Of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft first signaled this thought: “I perceive, but As the Short Residence unfolds, however, the mobility of the subject, which had initially presented itself as both liberating and creative, modulates into something compromised, inescapable. During her Short Residence, the narrator adopts several modes of travel but never settles: her account of boat trips, carriage rides, ferry passages, walks, and, most significantly, flights of fancy, purposefully has no end.
Her travelogue thus tells us more about the mind of the traveler-subject, charting her path through a “heterogeneous modernity,” than about the three countries she visits. “The art of travelling,” she remarks elsewhere, “is only a branch of the art of thinking.” In the Short Residence the thinking subject herself cannot be distinguished from constant movement. HereWollstonecraft takes the restlessness and dislocation that marked her own life, as well as the society she observed in northern Europe, and tries to shape them into a style, an argument, and a political stance. A short residence in three countries? Over the course of one summer? Upheaval writes itself into the title, and becomes the motor of this peculiar but lovely book. (VRM 5:76)įrom the title of the last book published before her death, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), we can guess that for Mary Wollstonecraft the word “residence” reflects little stability or rest. And that we wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears. I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here.
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