Re-imagining Eliza Fenwick
Filed under Centers and Institutes
Posted by Web Team, April 24, 2008
View all posts for April 2008
A Friday Afternoon Wine and Cheese event hosted by the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature.
“Re-imagining Eliza Fenwick: An Eighteenth-Century Life for the Twenty-first Century.”
Presented by Lissa Paul, Brock University
May 9th
3:00 - 4:30 PM
Special Functions Room
In children’s book history, the teaching/writing women of the late eighteenth-century typically get a bad rap as tediously boring followers of Rousseau. Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840) was one of those women. A teacher, mother, author and close friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, Fenwick, like Wollstencraft and other women in their intimate circle (the “Sex and the City” women of their day), struggled with work, children, and relationships while attempting to define a new shape for their lives. For children, she wrote books I’d characterize as examples of “product placement,” celebrity bio,” and interactive learning.” Fenwick’s 1795 epistolary novel, “Secresy” has been reissued. This talk will attend to her work—and to her life as she travelled from the crucible of radical London to Barbados to North America.
RSVP to Erin Nichols erin.nichols@simmons.edu or Ext 2220
Wine and light Refreshments will be provided.
