[Hays, Mary] Wedd, A.F.

The Fate of the Fenwicks – Letters to Mary Hays (1798-1828).

First Edition. London, Methuen & Co., 1927. Octavo (14.5 cm wide x 22 cm high). XVI, 248 pages (including Appendix and Index) plus 8 pages of a book-catalogue to the rear “Methuen’s General Literature”. Hardcover / Original publisher’s cloth. The spine detaching. The binding otherwise firm and overall in very good condition with only minor signs of wear. Some minor signs of foxing. A very, very rare book !!

Eliza Fenwick (1 February 1767 – 8 December 1840) was a Cornish author, whose works include Secresy; or The Ruin on the Rock (1795) and several children’s books. She was born in Cornwall, married an alcoholic, and had two children by him. She left him and eventually went to live with her children in Barbados, where she ran a school with her daughter.

Eliza Jaco was born on 1 February 1767 at Pelynt, Cornwall. Her parents were Peter and Elizabeth Jaco (née Hawkswotorth), and she was baptized Elizabeth on 25 June 1766. She married in the 1780s the writer John Fenwick, who became an alcoholic and fell in debt. They had two children, Eliza and Orlando. She took up tasks such as working as a governess to make family ends meet, but eventually left Fenwick and moved to Ireland as a governess in 1807.

By this time, Fenwick’s daughter had moved to the West Indies to be an actress, and married William Rutherford, by whom she had four children. Fenwick and her son, Orlando, joined her daughter in Barbados in 1814, but Orlando died of yellow fever in 1816. In 1819, Fenwick’s son-in-law left the family, leaving the mother and daughter to bring up the four children. The pair ran a secondary school, which provided income and ensured the children’s own education. Fenwick owned several enslaved people who worked in the school and her household.

Fenwick’s daughter died in 1828, leaving her to raise the children alone. By 1835 she was living in the United states and she died in 1840 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Throughout her life, Eliza Fenwick corresponded with friends who included Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Turner Smith, and Charles and Mary Lamb. Much of the correspondence survives. Her epistolary novel “Secresy; or The Ruin on the Rock” was published as “By a Woman” in 1795. Her subsequent works were written for children, sometimes under the pseudonym Rev. David Blair. Mary and Her Cat (1804) was advertised as being “in words not exceeding two syllables”. Visits to the Junior Library (1805, facsimile 1977) tells of a ghastly West Indian family with a slave nurse being “reclaimed by discovering the joys of learning.” (Wikipedia)

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Mary Hays (1759–1843) was an autodidact intellectual who published essays, poetry, novels and several works on famous (and infamous) women. She is remembered for her early feminism, and her close relations to dissenting and radical thinkers of her time including Robert Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and William Frend.

She was born in 1759, into a family of Protestant dissenters who rejected the practices of the Church of England (the established church). Hays was described by those who disliked her as ‘the baldest disciple of [Mary] Wollstonecraft’ by The Anti Jacobin Magazine, attacked as an ‘unsex’d female’ by clergyman Robert Polwhele, and provoked controversy through her long life with her rebellious writings. When Hays’s fiancé John Eccles died on the eve of their marriage, Hays expected to die of grief herself. But this apparent tragedy meant that she escaped an ordinary future as wife and mother, remaining unmarried. She seized the chance to make a career for herself in the larger world as a writer.

Hays was influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and after writing admiringly to her, the two women became friends. The backlash following Wollstonecraft’s death and posthumous publication of her Memoirs impacted Hays’ later work, which some scholars have called more conservative. Among these later productions is the six-volume compendium Female Biography: or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of All Ages and Countries, in which Wollstonecraft is not mentioned, although Hays had written an extensive obituary for The Annual Necrology shortly after Godwin’s controversial Memoirs. If Wollstonecraft was neglected through the nineteenth century, Hays and her writing received even less critical evaluation or academic attention until the twentieth-century’s emerging feminist movement. (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: Barbados · Catalogue No.10 – International Literature · Catalogue Three – Literature by Women · Eliza Fenwick (Barbados) · English Literature – Rare · English Literature by Women – 19th Century · English Literature of the 19th century · Feminism – Rare · Mary Hays · Women in Literature
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 31995AB

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