SENSIBILITY AND PROGRESS IN MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S RATIONALISED “SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY”
SENSIBILITY AND PROGRESS IN MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S RATIONALISED “SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY”

Summary/Abstract: Sensibility and Progress in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rationalised “Sentimental Journey”. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an ardent believer in individual freedom and self-development; consequently, she frequently discussed the possibilities of women’s education and self-reliance in her writings. Being rather reckless in her life, she was often on the move, not only searching for better life conditions but also following her own impulses in her critical reading. The motif of intellectual mobility features her educational writings, argumentative works, novels, and her last publication, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) as well. In my paper, I will map the multiplicity of the concept of mobility and elaborate on the senses of escapism in Wollstonecraft’s travel-letters, moving beyond Laurence Sterne’s notion of “a sentimental journey” (A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 1768). Moreover, in Letters, in her solitary walks and fanciful reveries, not only Wollstonecraft’s inclination to the (natural and textual) sublime but also Rousseau’s ideas on exercise and movement will be detected (cf. Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1782). On the one hand, my interpretation is contextualised by the late-eighteenth-century view on women’s limitations of “sensibility”, displaying the constraints the age demanded; on the other hand, I intend to place the travelogue in Mary Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre and highlight the synthesising quality of the writing as a piece of “travail” and/or “a labour of love”.

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