Original Letters from India.
Scarce Female Account Of 18th Century India:
Eliza Fay’s Personal and Business Travels
Fay, Eliza. Original Letters from India. Containing a narrative of a journey through Egypt, and the author’s imprisonment at Calicut, by Hyder Ally. To which is added, an abstract of three subsequent voyages to India. Printed at Calcutta, 1821.
8vo.; engraved frontispiece of the author in Egyptian dress; 1936 ownership signature on front endpaper, and two small unidentified ownership plates; pale blue endpapers; page edges foxed; half calf, stamped in gilt; marbled boards; edges gently nicked and bumped. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Second edition of this woman’s account of her amazing adventures in global travel, her marriage and separation, and her business dealings. First published in 1817 in Calcutta, it was re-published over a century later by Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard at their Hogarth Press, with notes by E.M. Forster. With a publisher’s announcement for the Hogarth Press edition loosely inserted, and with the Daily Mail review, dated in pencil May 26, 1925, affixed to the front pastedown. The publisher’s slip is annotated in black ink, “Rec. 23 Oct 1924” and “By Hogarth Press,” and bears the truncated stamp, in blue ink, of a later bookseller.
Fay’s journal-style letters—some brief, others encompassing many short entries contributed daily over weeks—are written in a conversational and ungrammatical tone and with an eye to vivid detail. Through them, she traces her historic journey (with her husband, “a lowly advocate sent to the Supreme Court in 1779”) from France, to Italy, to India, during which she had many exciting, illuminating, and dangerous encounters. Among these are “a near fatal attack in the Egyptian desert on the way from Cairo to Suez, along with their stay there together and sensational imprisonment by the anti-British dictator Hyder Ali in Calicut.” The latter portion of the book covers Fay’s later solo trips to India and America. The Fays had parted company in 1784, and Eliza began a business exporting—by hand, herself—fine muslins to the States, an enterprise Robinson refers to in Wayward Women as “more enthusiastic than successful.” Indeed, in her preface she herself writes that these later “trials and anxieties…have produced only a long train of blasted hopes, and heart rending disappointments” (p. v).
Recipients of her letters urged her to publish an account of her exploits, but she demurred, as,
at this period a woman who was not conscious of possessing decided genius or superior knowledge could not easily be induced to leave ‘the harmless tenor of her way,’ and render herself amenable to the ‘pains and penalties’ then, generally, inflicted on female authorships; unless inspired by that enthusiasm that tramples on difficulties, or goaded by misfortune which admits not of alternative. (p. iv).
Later in life, however, she realized that “since then, a considerable change has gradually taken place in public sentiments,” and “a female author is no longer regarded as an object of derision, nor is she wounded by unkind reproof from the literary Lords of Creation.”
In this indulgent era the author presumes to deliver her letters to the world as they have been preserved by the dear sister to whom they were partly addressed, trusting that as this is, in its nature, the most unassuming of all kinds of writing, and one that claims the most extensive allowances, they will be received with peculiar mercy and forbearance.
She concludes with a touching paragraph of thanks to people of Calcutta:
Long acquaintance, high esteem, and unfeigned affection call for this peculiar tribute. Five times has she visited this city, under various circumstances, and with different feelings, yet never had cause to regret the length or the dangers of the voyage, secure of ever meeting here, all that could encrease [sic] the joys of social life, in its happiest moments, or soothe t
Print Inquire