Lissa Paul, Jennifer Slagus, Adrienne Kitchin, Murray Wilcox
Hardback
December 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-441-0 • $150.00
Paperback
December 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-440-3 • $72.95
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Series
Early Modern Feminisms
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.
About the Editors
Lissa Paul is a professor of English language and literature at Brock University, specializing in literacy and diversity. She is the author of Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (2019) and The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century (2011). Her edited collections include Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War (2016), eds. Lissa Paul, Rosemary Ross Johnston, and Emma Short; Keywords for Children’s Literature (2011), eds. Philip Nel and Lissa Paul; and The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005), eds. Jack Zipes, Lissa Paul and Lynne Vallone.
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 to locate—and to produce—counternarratives to long existing tropes regarding how women’s pain is perceived in medical contexts. She uses new materialisms and counterhumanist anticolonialisms in her quest to close the gap in health disparities for women in their diverse intersectionality. Adrienne’s research is dedicated to all those who have fallen through the cracks.
Murray Wilcox is an independent scholar, though he is affiliated with Brock University. He is a collaborator with Lissa Paul in her SSHRC-funded research project on Eliza Fenwick. His research interests are eighteenth-century print culture and Romantic-period female authors. In his recent research on Eliza Fenwick’s life in Upper Canada, Murray has been able to trace Eliza’s social interactions with notable figures living there in the 1830s, including politicians, members of the British military, and prominent local businessmen. As an archivist with the Addison Library at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Murray has worked on the transcription and publication of two MSS found within the collection. Over the last few years, Murray has given talks at ASECS, CSECS, NESECS, and BSECS.