Lissa Paul. <i>Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist</i>

Perhaps best known for her friendship with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1790s, Eliza Fenwick’s own extraordinary life story has been somewhat overlooked by historians and literary scholars. After around a decade of moving in London’s radical and intellectual circles, Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840) left her spendthrift and alcoholic husband, John, and embarked on various projects in order to provide for her children, including taking up positions as a governess for wealthy families and writing children’s literature. In 1814, shortly after her daughter moved to Barbados to join an acting company, Fenwick made the decision to follow her, and emigrated to the West Indies with her son. There the two women opened their first school for young ladies. Despite regular upheavals (the family moved to New York and Toronto before Eliza eventually settled in Rhode Island) Eliza found her niche in running schools for girls, although whether she was an astute businesswoman is debatable. Lissa Paul’s well-researched biography, Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist, thus provides an important account of one woman’s experiences of single motherhood, transatlantic emigration, and running a business in the early decades of the nineteenth century.The book draws heavily on Fenwick’s surviving correspondence, which Paul has meticulously pieced together from various archives. She speculates on the thoughts and motivations of her subject quite often, but this is understandable given the source material she had to work with. The title of each chapter underlines a particular “identity” worn by Eliza through the course of her life, including “mother and author,” “governess and networker,” and “colonist and slaveholder.” While the historical contexts of some of these themes were thoroughly examined, others, like “friend,” could have been more developed.Paul sets out her “agenda” in the prelude, explaining that she aims to prove Fenwick has a place amongst the canonical late-Enlightenment literary women and to restore her image from the damage that was done to it by Annie F. Wedd. Wedd was a descendent of Fenwick’s friend, the author Mary Hays, who published an edited version of their correspondence, which paints Fenwick as an “incompetent” failure (7). Paul creates a new and more sympathetic image of Fenwick, as a strong and independent single mother, who never gave up on her dream of achieving financial stability for her family. Paul emphasizes that this came at a price: Fenwick’s need to provide for the family left her with little time to write the philosophical novels that her peers were producing, a dilemma with which any parent who has to juggle writing with the need for immediate income can empathize for this reason, Fenwick’s full-length novel, Secresy, or, The Ruin on the Rock (1795) remains her only known attempt at the genre. Fenwick did, however, establish herself as an author of children’s literature, which enabled her to continue to develop her intellectual interest in pedagogy. Paul’s discussion of the period in Fenwick’s life where she was writing for the exploitative publisher Richard Phillips was particularly illuminating.Paul writes in a lively and engaging style. Her frequent use of anachronisms and cinematic framing jarred a bit with the historical subject. Fenwick’s life was quite tragic, both of her children predeceased her, as did two of her four grandchildren. However, Paul writes for a popular audience and wants to make the narrative accessible and relatable for her readers. Indeed, although it is light on scholarship, the book does provide a good introduction to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for a popular audience, and covers topics such as the abolition movement, slavery, Methodism, and the Enlightenment. The biography will also be of interest to scholars researching radical women (Fenwick’s radicalness gradually declines over the course of her life) and those working on single and separated mothers. For the most part, Fenwick appears to have moved quite easily in respectable societies in the colonial world, but both her and her daughter’s sexual reputations were questioned when they established a school for young ladies in New Haven, Connecticut. The fact that the two women brought no men with them prompted scandal, as it was assumed their respective offspring were illegitimate. This ultimately resulted in the closure of the school, and Fenwick moved her family to New York. In the detailed telling of one woman’s life story, Paul achieves her aim of showing how a personal history can be used to shed light on the “seismic political and cultural shifts of the day” (9).

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