Liz Fenwick interview

Liz Fenwick has topped the summer bestseller list with her latest Cornish romance. The River Between Us has taken the American-born author, who now lives on the Lizard peninsula, into a corner of the Duchy she admits she does not know.

The mighty Tamar River defines the boundary between Cornwall and Devon. Perhaps between Cornwall and England. Liz Fenwick says she has used it in the novel as a symbol for the divide between classes, between past and present.

Her story is set in the very real locale of Endsleigh Cottage, once owned by the Dukes of Bedford, now the Hotel Endsleigh, sixteen miles north of Saltash. The mansion is surrounded by gardens designed by Humphry Repton.

“If you like gardens just go see the garden and that is pure magic.”

Liz comes originally from Malden near Boston, Massachusetts. She studied English Literature at Mount Holyoke college and planned to go to Harvard. Instead she came to England and soon found herself working at Lloyds of London, the famous insurance market.

Marriage to Chris Fenwick, an English geologist working in the oil industry, followed. They moved to Canada, Russia and Indonesia and had three children, Dom, Andrew and Sasha, two sons and a daughter.

It was in Dubai that Liz’s lifelong passion for writing rekindled and turned into something more practical. 

With the help of the Romantic Novelists’ Association she worked and reworked her manuscripts until her agent, the late Carole Blake, thought the first, The Cornish House, was ready for publication.

Liz describes the effect she was aiming at as “Daphne du Maurier meets Jodi Picoult”. Her novels have attracted a loyal readership. Cornwall Libraries record 47 reservations for her latest.

“I think it’s a great escapist read. It’s an emotional read. I am a writer of women’s fiction so therefore I’m always going to be targeted as a beach read. And what an honour that people would spend their holiday time reading my books. I provide entertainment, that’s what I do.”

She is also very popular in the Netherlands and Sweden. While promoting The River Between Us at bookshops and libraries in Cornwall and beyond she is hard at work on her next book, set during World War II.

A lot of research went into The River Between Us. The Tamar usually seems broad and powerful, “but there,” she says, “at Endsleigh, the river in summer is so low you can walk it.”

There may well have been love affairs across the class divide. “I’m sure it [happened]. It was truly not spoken about. Because, as with most history, it’s not told from the female point of view, so it’s less likely to be found until you get access to people’s journals and that sort of thing.”

Roger Howe

Interview, Truro, 22 July 2021