Henrietta Camilla Jenkin

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HCJ was the author of eleven novels published over three and a half decades of the mid nineteenth century. They draw on her wide European and—perhaps most powerfully in her unflinching depiction of slavery—her Jamaican experience. Despite their frequent treatment of courtship they sometimes warn readers to beware of marriage altogether.
  • BirthName: Henrietta Camilla Jackson
  • Married: Jenkin
  • Pseudonyms: The Author of the Maid's Husband; The Author of Cousin Stella; Mrs C. J.

Milestones

1807 or 1808

Henrietta Camilla Jackson (later HCJ ) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the only daughter in a family which also had three sons.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Fleeming Jenkin. “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin”. Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c., edited by Sir Sidney Colvin et al., Longmans, Green, 1877, p. 1: xi - clxx.
xxiii

By 9 May 1840

HCJ published with Richard Bentley the first of her novels, Miss Aylmer; or, The Maid's Husband, anonymously: she began writing because her family needed the money.
The old Dictionary of National Biography article on HCJ ignored this novel and its successors, calling Violet Bank and Its Inmates her first novel. Various sources adopt this mistake.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
654 (1840): 371-2

By June 1859

HCJ 's anti-slavery novel Cousin Stella; or, Conflict, published as by the author of Violet Bank and set mostly in Jamaica in the early 1830s, was the one that made her name.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Editors Chapple, J. A. V. and Arthur Pollard, Harvard University Press, 1967.
562

1874

HCJ set her final novel, Jupiter's Daughters, in French provincial society.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

8 February 1885

HCJ died of paralysis and bronchitis,
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
three days after her husband 's death (of which she was not told); her son died only four months later, quite unexpectedly, after a minor operation.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Fleeming Jenkin. “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin”. Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c., edited by Sir Sidney Colvin et al., Longmans, Green, 1877, p. 1: xi - clxx.
clii, cliv

Biography

Birth and Family

1807 or 1808

Henrietta Camilla Jackson (later HCJ ) was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the only daughter in a family which also had three sons.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Fleeming Jenkin. “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin”. Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c., edited by Sir Sidney Colvin et al., Longmans, Green, 1877, p. 1: xi - clxx.
xxiii

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