Exhibition to tell story of married woman’s affairs with lover & another man.
An 18th century love story from Mumbai (then Bombay) has been alive in England for nearly 250 years. A charity trust is now organising an exhibition on the 1773 love story involving an English woman who was madly in love with a naval officer despite being married and having another lover waiting for her in England.
The wife of a director of the East India Company, Eliza Daniel Draper, on the night of January 14, 1773, descended from the bedroom of her sea-facing bungalow on Mazgaon hill with the help of a rope ladder and got into a boat waiting below to elope with naval officer Commodore Sir John Clarke.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has put up a solitary plaque at the place where her bungalow once stood. “The plaque is on the Bhandarwada water reservoir in Mazgaon,” said city historian Deepak Rao, who did a study for the book Mumbai’s Water, published by BMC engineers.
Draper’s love story is a tale of passion and betrayal. She did not get along with her husband, but one of her lovers, Lawrence Sterne, sent letters to her every day and kept a room for her in England in the hope that she would return from India. Draper met Sterne, vicar of Coxwold and author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, during a visit to Britain in 1766-67. Sparks flew and they spent the next three months in a relationship which became all-consuming for Sterne.
He wrote to her every day even though both of them were married. Draper got married to a man 30 years older to her when she was 14. Draper and Sterne’s was an odd match - the clergyman was 54 and she was 23. After Draper left for India, Sterne longed for her. He even made a ‘sweet little apartment’ for her at Britain’s Shandy Hall, which is known as ‘Eliza’s room’ to this day. His letters were later developed into The Journal to Eliza, a fictionalised account of their relationship.
The Laurence Stern Trust is holding an exhibition titled ‘Precious Cargo-Eliza Draper: An Absent Presence’ at Shandy Hall from April 29 to June 29. “This is an exhibition about absence. It is full of emptiness. The central figure, Eliza Draper, has had a significant influence at Shandy Hall, though she never came here. She is an absent presence in a room that was created for her,” Patrick Wildgust, curator of the exhibition, told DNA from Coxwold, England.
“The story of Sterne and Eliza is difficult to represent in an exhibition. However, the story of their ‘affair’ is universal. Sterne’s letters to Eliza (printed, like his sermons, under the name of his alter ego Yorick) reveal a new voice. Their separation was like bereavement to him. His attempts to ward off depression resulted in the making of Eliza’s room in Shandy Hall - a room dedicated to her where she never came,” he said.
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