Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840)

Eliza Fenwick, née Jaco or Jago, was born in Cornwall, England. Around 1788, she married John Fenwick, with whom she had two children and lived in London. Her husband was an alcoholic and fell heavily into debt. Eliza went to work as a governess and began writing to help support the family. In 1795, she published an epistolary novel called Secresy; or The Ruin on the Rock, under the pseudonym "By a Woman." Her subsequent works were for children, sometimes published under the pseudonym Rev. David Blair. During the 1790s, she was an active member of the radical literary circle around Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and knew Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, Amelia Opie, and Mary Robinson. Eliza was so close to Mary Wollstonecraft that she was present at the birth of her child Mary Shelley, taking charge of the infant in the days following Wollstonecraft’s sudden death from septicemia. Eliza eventually left her husband and moved to Ireland around 1807. There she worked again as a governess. Her daughter Eliza Anne moved to the West Indies to be an actor, married, and had four children. Eliza Fenwick and her son Orlando joined them in Barbados in 1814, where Orlando died of yellow fever at age 17. Shortly after, Fenwick's son-in-law left the family, leaving Eliza and her daughter to support the four children. The two women ran a girls' school between 1815 and 1822, and Fenwick owned several enslaved people who worked in the school and her household.
Her daughter died in 1828, leaving Eliza to bring up the children alone. They immigrated to Canada in 1829, settling in Niagara, Ontario, where Eliza opened the Niagara Seminary for Young Ladies. By 1835, she was living in the USA.
Throughout her life, Eliza corresponded with her literary friends, and a selection of the letters was published in 1927 by Annie Wedd as The Fate of the Fenwicks.