Born: 6 June 1841, Belarus
Died: 18 May 1910
Country most active: Belarus, Poland
Also known as: Eliza Pawłowska
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Her father, one of the landed gentry and an officer of the Polish troops under Napoleon, died when she was eighteen months old. Eliza was very carefully brought up by her mother, and at the age of sixteen, was married to Peter Orzeszko, a wealthy landowner. In 1863, her husband was condemned by the Russian authorities to exile in Siberia for participation in the Insurrection, and left alone in her despair, Eliza sought comfort in books. Her first work, entitled Years of Hunger, describing the struggle for existence, was published in 1876. She carefully studied and analyzed the life of the peasants, townspeople and Jews. A realist in style, her keen observation was strengthened by her feminine intuition.
Her maxim was, Knowledge is Power. She refreshed the hearts and minds of her readers by her stories of the vicissitudes of contemporaneous life in Poland. Yet her works display a strong feeling of the epic, a quality rarely met with in woman. Orzeszkowa is of the type of heroic Polish womanhood, who picked up the reins of government while their husbands fought and gave their lives for their beloved Poland. She wrote in all about forty stories and novels, a collection of which was published in Warsaw in 1911-1914. She died at her work in 1910, at Grodno. A number of books have been written about her as a woman and as an author.