Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper онлайн

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The sojourn of Mrs. Draper in England had been to the change and harm of her character. With her little knowledge of the world, she took Sterne and her flatterers too seriously. She was no doubt attractive in appearance, with her oval face and light airs, but her admirers said to her face that she was beautiful; and worse than that, they tried to make out that she possessed qualities of mind which, if cultivated, would surely lead to distinction in literature. They sent her back to the dull humdrum of India with the literary ambitions of Mrs. Montagu and the blue-stockings. Henceforth she was to find at Bombay a great “Dearth of every thing which could charm the Heart—please the Fancy, or speak to the judgment.” Still Mrs. Draper seems for a time to have made the best of the situation. Writing from Tellicherry in 1769 to a friend in England, she spoke with respect if not with enthusiasm of her husband, whom she was assisting in his official correspondence. But by 1772 she became thoroughly sick of India and of her husband in particular. In a letter to Mrs. James from Bombay she lamented that she was compelled to remain in a detestable country, where her health was declining, and her mind was tortured by the desire to return to England and be with her daughter. At this time she was no longer living with Draper as a wife, and for sufficient reasons, for he was engaged in open intrigue with an attendant—a Mrs. Leeds. In retaliation and despair, Mrs. Draper abruptly left her husband on the night of January 14–15, 1773, in company with Sir John Clark of the Navy, then in command of a frigate at Bombay. She sought refuge for a time with a “kind uncle,” Tom Whitehill, at Rajahmandry, and the next year she returned to England, where much attention was paid to her as Sterne’s Eliza. She associated, perhaps not to her good fame, with John Wilkes the politician; and, if an anecdote of Rogers is to be trusted, William Combe, the literary hack, could boast “that it was with him, not with Sterne, that Eliza was in love.” More to be pitied than to be censured, the unfortunate Mrs. Draper died at Bristol on August 3, 1778, in the thirty-fifth year of her age.