Fenwick Letters

The second of this two-volume edition of The Fenwick Letters covers the North American phase of Eliza Fenwick's transformative, transnational odyssey, from 1822 to 1840. Although no longer the radical author she was in the 1790s, advocating for the rights of women to be educated, or the innovative author of children's books that she was in the early 1800s, she was still very much a writer. In her North American incarnation, however, she was primarily an educator, a businesswoman running her own school, and a single, working grandmother attempting to find safety as well as economic and domestic stability for herself and her remaining family. Eliza's letters are consistently riveting, filled with sharply drawn portraits of the people, places, environment, politics, and culture of each community in which she lived. The letters also reveal Eliza's genius for developing networks of social, political, and cultural connections as she established and sought to support herself and her family in North America.

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 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, using new materialisms and counterhumanist anticolonialisms in her quest to close the gap in health disparities for women in their diverse intersectionality. Jennifer Slagus is a neurodivergent assistant professor and 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. Murray Wilcox was an independent scholar, affiliated with Brock University. He was a collaborator with Dr. Lissa Paul in her SSHRC-funded research project on Eliza Fenwick.