Orzeszkowa’s early life gave little indication of her later espousal of feminist views, fairly radical for traditional Polish society of the early 1870s. She spent her childhood on her father’s estate in Milikowszczyzna near Grodno in eastern Poland.4 Even though her father died when she was only a toddler, his death did not substantively change the family’s lifestyle, which was typical of a landed gentry home at the time. Both she and her older sister were educated at home by Polish and foreign-born live-in tutors. In her memoirs, she remembered fondly a Polish teacher who instilled in her and her sister great love for Polish literature and history, but also recalled their intense dislike for a German nanny. Eliza, obviously a precocious child, could not remember a time when she was not able to read both in Polish and in French. She entertained her frequently ailing sister with her own original tales and at the age of seven, she wrote her first novel—a melodrama of crime and guilt. But soon everything changed. By the time she turned ten, her sister died and she was sent to a boarding school in Warsaw where she would spend the next five years. Soon after finishing her formal education, seventeen-year-old Eliza married Piotr Orzeszko, a man twice her age, who owned a neighboring estate. Her own assessment of this period in her life was quite harsh. She wrote, “I was thoughtless and irresponsible. . . . I was nothing but vanity. I was delighted with my beautifully furnished and decorated home, with my clothes, servants, constant visits from friends and young neighbors.”5 Yet it was also then that under the tutelage of several well-educated acquaintances, she began a slow process of self-education by reading voraciously. Her favorite books included classic works of French and Polish literature as well as English Romantics in French translation. She also rediscovered her passion for writing. However, this intense project of self-improvement had for Orzeszkowa some unanticipated results. Within only a couple of years of her marriage, even before she turned twenty, she realized that the lack of any intellectual or emotional connection to her husband made her deeply unhappy. Even though she understood very well that marriage protected her from financial concerns and secured for her a solid social position, she began to consider filing for divorce. What she possibly did not anticipate was that freeing herself from this failed relationship would take many years, would cost her a fortune in high legal expenses, and would expose her to considerable social censure.
Marta, one of Orzeszkowa’s early works, is certainly a novel of its times as well as an indirect reflection of the author’s life. She chose her protagonist carefully from the ranks of the landed gentry. She understood this class well and knew that many, like herself, were struggling at this difficult time in Polish national and social history. In 1795, almost eighty years before Orzeszkowa published her novel, Poland ceased to exist as an independent country and was partitioned by and absorbed into the three neighboring empires: Russia, Prussia, and Austria.6 Yet Polish patriots, many of whom hailed from the landed gentry, never accepted the status quo. They continued to fight for the country’s independence militarily through armed uprisings as well as culturally through numerous efforts to preserve Polish national identity when language and culture were threatened by the anti-Polish policies of the occupying powers. Orzeszkowa herself became actively involved in the tragic January Uprising of 1863/64 that erupted in the Russian-controlled territory of Poland.
The mid-nineteenth-century political crisis in the Russian empire rekindled Polish hopes for regaining independence. Polish patriots organized numerous clandestine networks in the Russian-controlled Congress Kingdom of Poland (1815–67)7 with its capital in Warsaw. The sole purpose of such organizations was to fight for freedom and liberate Poland from foreign domination. Beginning in 1860, a series of patriotic street demonstrations erupted in Warsaw and continued into the following year, when in February marchers were attacked and shot at by Russian troops. The funerals of the five fatally shot demonstrators became a spark for further patriotic actions. The Russian-appointed governor of the Congress Kingdom, concerned about the volatility of the situation, planned to preempt any organized Polish insurrection by announcing conscription to the tsarist army. Such forced military service would cripple the conspirators by removing all able-bodied Polish young men from their ranks. This decision achieved the opposite effect, forcing Polish underground organizations to call Poles to arms and announce on January 22, 1863, the commencement of a Polish armed uprising against Russia.
For more than a year and a half, Polish insurrectionists fought the Russian army.8 Unfortunately, even with the support of their compatriots from the other two partitions as well as help from Polish émigrés abroad, they were not able to construct a regular Polish army and defeat the Russians. Polish volunteer forces were outnumbered approximately two to one by the regular Russian army. The January Uprising was a valiant patriotic effort that mobilized the entire society, as both men and women of all classes bore arms. The Jewish population also joined in this military effort. In addition, the revolutionaries were supported by an even larger number of Poles in noncombatant roles who helped by supplying food and clothing for the soldiers, caring for the wounded, and burying the dead. Unfortunately, in the end Polish volunteer forces succumbed to the regular Russian army. In addition to the casualties incurred during the heroic but often hopeless battles, the Russian reprisals after the defeat of the uprising further devastated the country and exposed its population to redoubled Russification efforts. This led many Poles to reconsider the value of armed resistance in the existing geopolitical situation and to shift their goals. Rebuilding Poland’s economy, strengthening its social structures, and preserving Polish culture became their premier objectives.
In her memoirs published posthumously in book form as O sobie (About myself, 1970), Orzeszkowa considered the effects of the trauma of the failed January Uprising on her and her generation. She described herself as a twenty-year-old witness to a national and social catastrophe:
I saw houses, which until recently brimmed with energy and activity, become swept clean of all signs of life as if during some deadly medieval plague. Deep in the woods, I saw mass graves hiding corpses of young men with whom I had so recently danced. I saw gallows, fear in the faces of the condemned . . . and the long lines of shackled prisoners on their way to Siberian exile being followed by their despairing families.9
Orzeszkowa understood very well that this national tragedy shook Polish social structure as well as gender balance. Thousands of women—wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and fiancées of the fallen or imprisoned heroes whose estates were confiscated by the occupying government—were reduced to poverty and left without means of support. The women, who had been trained exclusively for the domestic sphere, suddenly found themselves forced to seek employment for which they were sadly unprepared. In Orzeszkowa’s novel, even though Marta loses her husband to an illness and not to the armed struggle, she shares the fate of these desperate genteel women whom she encounters in employment agencies and in garment sweatshops.
The immediate aftermath of the January Uprising marked also a personal turning point for Orzeszkowa and contributed to the development of her writing career. She invested heavily in this patriotic enterprise of Polish independence. She served the military cause by taking up the important and very dangerous job of a courier responsible for securing lines of communication between different clandestine cells. Understandably, after the failure of the uprising, her despair at the scope of the national tragedy and the realization of the hopelessness of the political situation led her to reassess her own life and mission in society. Even though she was spared punitive measures for her active participation in the uprising, her husband was sentenced to exile to a penal colony in Siberia. In a rash decision that she would regret for the rest of her life, she refused to follow him into exile and would eventually divorce him. She did not love Piotr, and as she explained later, she did not know then that she should have sacrificed her own happiness in order to support the man who suffered for Poland.
With her husband in exile, Orzeszkowa quickly learned about financial difficulties. The expensive and lengthy divorce proceedings cost her the estate she inherited from her parents. Even the personal happiness she dreamt of appeared elusive. Her romantic relationship with Dr. Zbigniew Święcicki became impossible due to social pressure. Such a complicated personal life increased her sensitivity to the situation of single women in a society that neither respected nor provided a safety net for them. Likewise, she gained awareness of the constraints placed