Description: This first volume of Eliza Fenwick's letters trace the correspondence of and her daughter Eliza Ann Rutherford between 1797 and 1821. Beginning with the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in London and ending with the remnants of the Fenwick family leaving Barbados for America, this scholarly edition reveals how Fenwick shaped an independent life in a transnational context during a period of seismic political change.
Review Quotes: "The extraordinary life of the protean Eliza Fenwick, novelist, children's writer, shopkeeper, school teacher, business woman, emigrant, mother and grandmother, is caught in these vivid candid letters written from the 1790s to the 1830s. They depict an agitated progress through agitated times: with family to support, the ever resilient Fenwick combats loss and poverty by modifying style and opinions to suit shifting times. A radical in the London of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, an ambivalent observer in slave-owning Barbados, and a conservative reactionary in colonial Canada, she charms, surprises, disturbs and appeals by turns within this rich, engrossing book."--Janet Todd "author of Living with Jane Austen and Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden (2021)" (4/17/2025 12:00:00 AM)