Fenchurch is Arthur Dent's soulmate in the fourth book of the Hitchhiker "trilogy", the novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Fenchurch was named after the Fenchurch Street railway station where she was conceived in the ticket queue. 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, instead, to avoid complications with Paddington Bear.
She first appears as the unnamed girl in the café on the first page of the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; she is the girl referred to as "sitting on her own in a café in Rickmansworth." In the novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, when the Earth and everyone including Fenchurch had mysteriously reappeared, a romantic relationship blooms between her and Arthur Dent. He teaches her to fly, before a first aerial sexual encounter, and a second with Sony Walkman.
At the beginning of the novel Mostly Harmless, Fenchurch is referred to as having vanished abruptly during a hyperspace jump on their first intergalactic holiday. Douglas Adams later said 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 of the radio series, she is revealed to have been working as a waitress at Milliways since she vanished, and is reunited with Arthur Dent.
In fit the nineteenth of the radio series to fit the twenty-second of the radio series and fit the twenty-sixth of the radio series Fenchurch is played by actress Jane Horrocks.
She appears in the television series played by an uncredited actress for the "girl in a café in Rickmansworth" segment from the second episode. Her appearance corresponds to the one described in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
In the novel And Another Thing... the computer of the Tanngrisnir takes the form of Fenchurch in its programmed attempts to live out the sub-conscious desires of the ship's occupiers. While in this form she and Arthur talk and ponder together extensively, exacerbated by the effects of the ship's dark matter travel on people's emotions. Later in the book Arthur encounters another form of Fenchurch during a travel in hyperspace only to dematerialize, similar to his Fenchurch, across a plural zone into a different part of the universe.
Appears in:
- the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (unnamed cameo)
- the novel So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
- the novel Mostly Harmless (only mentioned in passing)
- the novel And Another Thing...
Read more about this topic: Loonquawl