arunkumar.a.s

Eliza Fay (1756-1816) was an actual Englishwoman, even if she was also, in the words of E. M. Forster, quite “a work of art.” Only a woman as confident in mind and body as Mrs. Fay could have survived the perilous adventures in foreign lands she relates here with such sang froid. As Simon Winchester writes in his introduction to this latest edition of her correspondence, she was someone “for whom the words imperturbable, indomitable, and redoubtable might have been coined.”

She was only 23, the half-educated wife of an Irish barrister, when the newlyweds set off in 1779 on a rough-and-tumble journey across Europe and the Middle East to Bengal. There, he quickly ran up debts and fathered an illegitimate child. Leaving the scoundrel, she returned to England in 1782 and supported herself by importing muslin and other goods that required her to voyage three more times to India, and once to America. Alas, no more successful at business than at marriage, she almost vanished from history. Little is known about her last 20 years except that she died penniless and intestate in Calcutta.
Had Forster not come upon a 1908 edition of her letters and cajoled Virginia and Leonard Woolf into reissuing them, a unique document of juicy 18th-century realism might be lost to us. In long letters (addressed to “My Dear Friends” or “My Dear Sister”), Mrs. Fay offers frank opinions of everyone she meets, and every place, while portraying herself as the plucky heroine of her own epistolary novel. “Grand Cairo” has, in her view, “neither order, beauty, nor grandeur,” and the gap between rich and poor is “disgusting.” She had entered the city in drag, disguised in silk robe and trousers. “I never could have thought my constitution was so strong. I bore the fatigues of the desert, like a Lion, though but just recovering from my illness. We have been pillaged of almost everything, by the Arabs.” Imprisoned with her husband for 15 weeks in 1780 by Hyder Ali in Calicut, now known as Kozhikode, on the Malabar coast, they bribe their way out and make their way to Madras, which she tours by palanquin and finds “every where delightful.” What she once thought were tall tales of sea captains — “dancing snakes, Jugglers swallowing swords” — she confirms with her own eyes. Her reports of life on the water, including an early description of a catamaran, are of historic as well as literary value.
Mrs. Fay surely realized that her life, however sad the end, was exceptional for daring and scope, especially for a woman of her time. Few men voyaged farther than she. As Mr. Winchester puts it, her contemporary Jane Austen would have been “shocked, shocked.”