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.

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.