Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay (New York Review of Books)

Eliza Fay was twenty-three years old and a newlywed woman when she and her feckless husband set off to improve their fortunes in India. In 1779  England was still embroiled in the Revolutionary War, in which France had joined forces with the American colonists. None of this turmoil enters Mrs. Fay’s sprightly piece of early travel literature. Instead she concentrates upon seeing Marie Antoinette at the theater, deciding that the ill-fated queen had “the sweetest blue eyes that ever were seen,” the joy of drinking a pint of Burgundy at every meal, remarking “I always preferred wine to beer,” and the disgusting spectacle of asparagus in Lyon “covered with a thick sauce of eggs, butter, oil and vinegar.” 

Having nearly reduced a French cook to tears by demanding her asparagus be “simply boiled with melted butter,” Mrs. Fay crosses the Alps, which she’s surprised to learn consists of more than one mountain, and is delighted to discover the inhabitants make “excellent butter and cheese.” Clearly this is a lady who travels on her stomach.

Once aboard the ship that’s bound for Calcutta, Mrs. Fay turns her attention from the pleasures of the table to the dissection of her fellow passengers. The only other Englishwoman on the voyage is “one of the very lowest taken off the streets of London” and another passenger “has the most odious pair of little white eyes mine have ever beheld.” Bereft of decent food and company, she retreats to her cabin where she makes a dozen shirts for her husband and persuades him to teach her shorthand. 

Her ship reaches the Indian port of Calicut (now Kozhikode) at a time when the city was under the rule of a Muslim rebel with no love for the English. Mrs. Fay, her husband, and other passengers are placed in captivity for fifteen weeks but this grisly interlude does nothing to quench her spirits. When released at last and safely in Madras, she’s enchanted by its “Asiatic splendor combined with European taste,” its buildings painted with chunam, a powder made from crushed shells that’s applied like whitewash and glows like marble. She finally arrives in Calcutta after a journey of twelve months and eighteen days and immediately approves of its colonial elegance and beauty. Although it is here that her husband’s “imprudent behaviour,” which results in his fathering a “natural child,” puts an end to her marriage, Mrs. Fay finds that India “interests me exceedingly.” She left only to return three more times over the course of her life, dying penniless in Calcutta at the age of sixty.

Her observations are piercing and evocative, with an amazing adaptability for a woman of her time and place. She resigns herself to living in “a house of thieves” with servants who skim a profit from every domestic transaction in exchange for living in a “land of luxury.” She casts a scathing eye upon her fellow expatriates “languishing under various complaints” which they blame on the climate while their lifestyle would “produce the same effects even in the hardy regions of the North.” She winces at the “luxurious indulgence” of the lengthy dinners which begin at two in the afternoon and end with a repose between four and five and finds something about the “Hindoos that interests me exceedingly” while writing graphic descriptions of local customs that she finds abhorrent. She travels about the countryside in a silk net hammock carried by two men or on a donkey while seated on “a sort of armchair with cushions and a footstool.” 

Mrs. Fay claimed to be happiest when she had a pen in her hand and it’s quite possible that these letters were written with a goal of future publication. She was far from the first Englishwoman to embark upon epistolary travel literature; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Turkey had become a publishing sensation sixteen years before Eliza Fay set off for India. But it’s Mrs. Fay’s letters, with their indiscretions and vitality, unpolished and irresistible, that are still read for pleasure centuries after they were written, setting a standard for modern-day travel writers who would find her travels difficult to emulate, assuming that any of us could survive them.~Janet Brown