In a letter dated 27th February 1835 to his brother Alexander, Carlyle described Miss Fenwick as “one of the finest old women ever discovered”. A month later, Carlyle elaborated to his mother “we have made acquaintance with a very excellent woman, since I wrote ; a Miss Fenwick (from the North Country, Durham or Northumberland originally) ; an oldish woman, with a deformity in the spine, but otherwise really rather good-looking ; I often say that she is the wisest person, male or female, I have fallen in with in London : I am very sorry that she is but a kind of visitor here (in the house of one Henry Taylor, also a very worthy person)”
Isabella Fenwick was amanuensis, confidante, advisor and friend to William Wordsworth. She is the scribe behind the Fenwick Notes, an autobiographical and poetic commentary Wordsworth dictated to her in 1843 based on the six-volume edition of his Poetical Works (1841) as well as his Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842). The Fenwick Notes supply a wealth of information about the composition of Wordsworth’s poems, much of it anecdotal and some of it slightly mis-remembered; taken together, they constitute the most extensive and sustained commentary on his poetry that Wordsworth ever made.
While Wordsworth intended the notes to be read as an independent document, supplementary to, yet separate from, the poems themselves, selections from the notes are regularly reprinted in editions of the poems: the story of the origins of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in the note to We Are Seven; the account of Wordsworth's bouts with "the abyss of idealism," in the note to Ode: Intimations of Immortality; the beginnings of his "consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country," related in the note to An Evening Walk.
