Henrietta Camilla Jenkin

Artist Info

Henrietta Camilla JenkinJamaica, about 1807 - 1885, Edinburgh

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n90634907

Jenkin [née Jackson], Henrietta Camilla (c.1807–1885), novelist, was born in Jamaica, the only daughter of Robert Jackson, a colonial administrator of Kingston, Jamaica, and his wife, Susan Campbell, a Scottish woman. Little is known of her early life, but in 1832 she married Charles Jenkin (1801–1885), midshipman (afterwards captain) in the Royal Navy, and they had a son, Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (1833–1885), who was born near Dungeness, Kent. She began to write under pressure of poverty; Robert Louis Stevenson later noted in a memoir of her son that she had written for no motive other than money. Her first novels were published in the 1840s and included Wedlock (1841), The Smiths (1843), and Lost and Won, or, The Love Test (1846). The Jenkins were forced by their financial circumstances to live in Europe from 1847 to 1851, living in Paris from 1847 to 1848, and then moving to Genoa, where she associated with Ruffini and other liberals.

In 1858 Jenkin published Violet Bank and its Inmates, which met with little success, but her next novel, Cousin Stella, or, Conflict (1859) generated both sales and controversy, and made Jenkin's reputation. A love story set in the Jamaica of her childhood, it has slavery as a key issue, and has graphic depictions of white brutality. Her next novel, Who Breaks, Pays (1861), was lighter in tone, and set in 1840s Italy. It was followed by several other novels, including Skirmishing (1862), and Once and Again (1865), a novel set in Paris.

In 1868 Jenkin's son was appointed to a professorship in engineering at Edinburgh University, and she lived with him after this, becoming a favourite in the city's society. Her health began to fail in 1875, and she died of paralysis and bronchitis at 1 Manchester Park, Edinburgh, on 8 February 1885, three days after her husband.

M. Clare Loughlin-Chow

Sources

R. L. Stevenson, Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin (1912) · J. Sutherland, The Longman companion to Victorian fiction (1988) · Blain, Clements & Grundy, Feminist comp. · DNB · d. cert.