Fenwick Letters : Reconstructing a Transnational Feminist Life, 1797-1821

The first of a two-volume edition of The Fenwick Letters covers 1797 to 1821, a period that marked the initial phase of Eliza Fenwick’s transnational odyssey, as she transformed from promising author to conservative schoolmistress and savvy businesswoman; from traveling in radical circles in London to establishing herself in colonial slave-dependent Bridgetown, Barbados; and from wife of radical journalist and author John Fenwick to single, working mother, trying to establish an independent life for herself and her children, Eliza Ann and Orlando. Eliza’s letters are consistently riveting, filled with sharply drawn portraits of the people, places, environment, politics, industries, and culture of each community she lived in.

ELIZA FENWICK (1767–1840) was a writer 1790s London, a member of Mary Wollstonecraft’s circle. When her marriage crumbled, she became a prolific author of children’s literature to support her family, and after moving to Barbados, she established a school for girls, and went on to open and teach at similar schools as she moved to various cities across the Northeastern United States and Canada. 

LISSA PAUL, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. The Children’s Book Business (2011) and a biography, Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (University of Delaware Press, 2019), constitute her previous two books on Fenwick. Paul was also an Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) and a co-editor of Keywords for Children’s Literature (2011, 2021).

ADRIENNE KITCHIN is a writer and educator focusing on women’s health and education. She is a PhD candidate in Social, Cultural, and Political contexts of Education at Brock University. Adrienne combines her background in medical anthropology and her doctoral research in educational studies to locate―and to produce―counternarratives to long existing tropes regarding how women’s pain is perceived in medical contexts. She uses new materialisms and counterhumanist anticolonialisms in her quest to close the gap in health disparities for women in their diverse intersectionality. Adrienne’s research is dedicated to all those who have fallen through the cracks.

JENNIFER SLAGUS is a neurodivergent assistant professor, social sciences librarian at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Slagus holds a PhD in Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts of Education from Brock University as well as a master’s in library and information science and a bachelor’s in English literature from University of South Florida. Their research applies critical neurodiversity studies to children’s literature, specifically interrogating representations of neurodivergence in twenty-first-century fiction for young readers. At the core of their work as a librarian and researcher is an unwavering commitment to accessibility for all.

MURRAY WILCOX is an independent scholar, though he is affiliated with Brock University. He is a collaborator with Dr. Lissa Paul in her SSHRC-funded research project on Eliza Fenwick. His research interests are eighteenth-century print culture and Romantic-period female authors. In his recent research on Eliza Fenwick’s life in Upper Canada, Murray has been able to trace Eliza’s social interactions with notable figures living there in the 1830s, including politicians, members of the British military and prominent local businessmen. As an archivist with the Addison Library at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Murray has worked on the transcription and publication of two MSS found within the collection. Over the last few years, Murray has given talks at ASECS, CSECS, NESECS, and BSECS.