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.

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).

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. 

Acknowledgements
Editorial Principles
Abbreviations
Introduction

1797-1801: Things Fall Apart
1802-1805: Imagining an Independent Life
1806-1810: From Author to Teacher
1811-1813: Toward a Colonial Life
1814-1821: Barbados