Gilbert went through a divorce, Wollstonecraft split with her American lover, Gilbert Imlay. Like Elizabeth Gilbert, Wollstonecraft embarked on her physical and spiritual journey in the aftermath of a major relationship breakdown. Title page from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 1796 via Wikimedia Commons She could, and would, write whatever book she had in her head. She’d already penned and published the explosive A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

And Wollstonecraft also wasn’t scared of critics.

This turned out to be the key for writing a trailblazer. She was a middle-class working author and journalist who had a young daughter (Fanny Imlay) to support and inner demons to work through in the form of a project. Like Elizabeth Gilbert, Wollstonecraft embarked on her physical and spiritual journey in the aftermath of a major relationship breakdown.īut Wollstonecraft wasn’t an aristocrat with a high social status to uphold. Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was such a book: informative yet guarded, with the author always conscious of the threat to her reputation if she included content better left secret. Missing was the objective of producing a bestseller. Women’s travel writing in the eighteenth century was sparse, its authorship typically restricted to wealthy aristocratic ladies writing as a pastime during or after being abroad with their families. More than two centuries earlier, in 1796, Enlightenment philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft published her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark to widespread acclaim. What many may not know is that, despite the critical and commercial success of Eat, Pray, Love, it wasn’t the first narrative of its kind. Here was a female writer who, seemingly for the first time, blended an engaging travelogue with an honest and intimate account of personal trauma. When Elizabeth Gilbert’s sensationally popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love was published in 2006, readers felt like they were being treated to something new.

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