Fenchurch is Arthur Dent's human soulmate.[1] She was named after the Fenchurch Street railway station where she was conceived in the ticket queue.[2] She lived in a house in Islington that happened to be on the exact spot where Arthur Dent had lived in a cave two million years earlier.
Oddly, despite her being a major character in So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, we never learn her surname.
Description
- “She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost somber, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at.”
- —Arthur Dent[src]
She plays the cello, has good taste in music and owns a pair of speakers that "would have impressed the guys who put up Stonehenge."
Adventures
She was the girl "sitting on her own in a café in Rickmansworth" on the first page of the book.[3] When the Earth and everyone including Fenchurch had mysteriously reappeared, a romantic relationship blossoms between her and Arthur Dent.[1] He teaches her to fly, before a first aerial sexual encounter on the wing of a plane, and a second with Sony Walkmen. She vanishes abruptly during a hyperspace jump on their first intergalactic holiday.[4] She worked as a waitress at Milliways since she vanished, and is reunited with Arthur Dent[5], although in And Another Thing... this is revealed to not have been a reality, instead of being the virtual life that the Guide Mark II gave Arthur. The computer of the Tanngrisnir takes the form of Fenchurch in its programming attempts to live out the sub-conscious desires of the ship's occupiers. While in this form, the two talk and ponder together extensively, exacerbated by the effects of the ship's dark matter travel on people's emotions. Arthur encounters another form of Fenchurch during a trip in Hyperspace on to dematerialise, similar to his Fenchurch, across a plural zone in a different part of the universe. <ref name = another>In the Eoin Colfer novel And Another Thing...</ref>
Appearances
Novels
- The novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (unnamed).
- The novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
- The novel Mostly Harmless (only mentioned in passing).
- The novel And Another Thing... (as the Tanngrisnir's projection).
Radio
Quandary Phase
Quintessential Phase
Comic Books
- The comic book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Comic Book) (unnamed)
Behind the scenes
Fenchurch was portrayed by:
- Actress Jane Horrocks (voice) in the radio series
- Unknown actress in the second episode of the television series.
Notes and references
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 In the fourth book of the Hitchhiker "trilogy" So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
- ↑ Adams revealed in an interview that it was really the ticket queues at Paddington Station that made him think of conceiving a character there, but chose Fenchurch as a name because of Paddington Bear.
- ↑ She first appeared as the unnamed girl in the café on the first page of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- ↑ At the beginning of the fifth book. Douglas Adams later claimed that he wanted to get rid of the character as she was getting in the way of the story. Much of this is evident from the self-referential prose surrounding Arthur and Fenchurch's relationship.
- ↑ In Fit the Twenty-Sixth.