Letters from Sweden was the last and most popular work Wollstonecraft published. It brought her a new set of readers and ensured her fame among a younger generation of Romantic authors. Shelley and Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary took a copy with them when they eloped to France in 1814; and several young men paid tribute to her, including Shelley himself. The book was equally praised by members of her own generation, especially those belonging to Godwin's circle. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Holcroft all expressed their admiration for the author of Letters from Sweden, but none more so than Godwin, who read them between meeting Wollstonecraft in January 1796 and her return from Berkshire in March, where she had gone to recover from a second suicide attempt. He later wrote: ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration’ (M. 249).

In his Memoirs Godwin gives a brief account of the events that took Wollstonecraft to Scandinavia. A mercantile adventure of Imlay's in Norway had gone badly wrong and he needed someone to go to Scandinavia to sort out the problem. Wollstonecraft seemed the ideal candidate for the task, and the journey promised ‘to recruit her health, and, if possible, her spirits’ (M. 248). ‘It was also gratifying to her feelings, to be employed in promoting the interest of a man, from whom she had experienced such severe unkindness, but to whom she ardently desired to be reconciled’ (M. 248). Godwin is unsure, however, about the precise nature of the business Wollstonecraft was to transact, admitting that this part of her life is shrouded in obscurity. The mystery surrounding the venture was finally solved in 1980 by Per Nystrøm, a governor of Gothenburg, whose findings are reported in the introduction to Richard Holmes's edition of Letters from Sweden, published in 1987. It seems that Wollstonecraft went to Scandinavia in hot pursuit of a stolen treasure ship crammed with silver and Bourbon plate.