During her short life, Mary Wollstonecraft managed to visit a wide swathe of Western Europe, spending time in Lisbon, Ireland, France, and Scandinavia. None of these journeys were pleasure travel: she went to Lisbon to help a dying friend, to Ireland and France to attempt to earn money as a governess and, less conventionally, as what might today be called a journalist, and to Scandinavia to untangle the business problems of her lover Gilbert Imlay. She was not unique among women of her class and era in going abroad for work or out of duty to friends and family: her friend Eliza Fenwick, for one, traveled even further afield while trying to establish a career as a teacher, moving from Ireland to Barbados to New York to Canada.1 Wollstonecraft, however, turned this travel-by-necessity into a literary opportunity, using her Scandinavian journey as the basis for her final book, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), which, of all her works, was perhaps the one most admired by her contemporaries. As many critics have noted, A Short Residence was not a straightforward travelogue: summing up more than two decades of work on the book, Ingrid Horrocks observes that it has been read as “blending discourses of political philosophy, landscape aesthetics, and sentimental travel.”2 Yet in some respects, that generic slipperiness makes the book very much at home in an era when there was no clear answer to the question of what a “typical” travelogue ought to look like. Not only was the nature of pleasure travel changing during the final years of the eighteenth century, becoming more accessible to women and to the middle classes in general (as critics including William H. A. Williams, Alastair Durie, and George Dekker have noted), but also the idea that travel narratives existed mainly or exclusively to convey factual information about unfamiliar lands and cultures was beginning to fall apart. Wollstonecraft, as a woman traveler, as a travel writer, and as a critic of travel herself, was positioned at the heart of one of the later eighteenth century’s more lively literary debates.