Her studies included history, composition, reading, literature, and languages – English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Russian.

In order to improve her delicate health, she spent her childhood in various places, including Saint Petersburg, Kyiv, and Novgorod Oblast, but she also visited her father who was exiled from the capital from 1812 to 1821.

Speranskaya began to travel as a means of overcoming her problems, visiting European cities, including the Dutch resort of Scheveningen, spa villages in Bavaria, Vienna and Salzburg in Austria, Lucerne in Switzerland, various places in the north of Italy.

Taking over the management of Velyka Burimka in 1842, Speranskaya built schools, orphanages, a brewery and distillery, brick works, carpentry shops, factories, and mills, and reorganized the hospital.

After four years of tiring work, the death of her surviving son, and the pending marriage of her daughter, Speranskaya traveled to Brussels, then to Basel and Geneva in Switzerland, and through Florence, Venice, and Trieste before making a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land.

To prevent her new son-in-law, Prince Rodion Nikolaevich Cantacuzène [d], taking over the administration of her estate, Speranskaya returned to Ukraine in 1847 and managed Velyka Burimka for the next three years until her health failed.

These included religious texts, travel sketches, stories of life in the Russian Empire, novels, plays, and children's books.

Her writing was popular with European audiences and gained favorable reviews from scholars like Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and Prosper Mérimée.

She was included in numerous biographical lexicons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while in recent years interest in her life and work has been renewed.

[10][11][12][Notes 2] Eliza served as a governess to Countess Catherine Shuvalova, who allowed the children Elizabeth, Marianne, and Francis to live with their mother.

[25] He requested his mother-in-law's help in 1801,[10][24] when he was promoted to serve as an "Assistant Minister of Justice, as Governor of Finland, as Privy Councillor, and as Secretary of State"[26] to Alexander, the new Tsar of Russia.

[10] Within six months the couple were having difficulties and Vasily, who was fond of his daughter-in-law suggested a temporary separation, sending Marianne and her family to Baldone (now in Latvia) to enjoy the sulfur water spa there.

[15] The Stephens family moved back in with Speransky briefly, but because of Speranskaya's delicate health, they left Saint Petersburg for Kyiv (now in Ukraine), where they remained until 1809.

[55] Blackwood states that it was because of an inappropriate love interest between his daughter and a military officer,[56] who historian Erik Amburger [de] identifies as Georg Weikard.

[56][58][59] Speransky began to draft plans to reorganize the provincial governments for more efficiency and took charge of finding Speranskaya a suitable husband, hosting numerous social events to allow her the opportunity to mix with society.

[84] Although Speranskaya created model farms, wood distribution facilities, dispensaries, and schools to ensure the welfare of her family and community,[80] her husband's mismanagement of the estate and failure to pay even the interest on the loans for three years found them facing foreclosure.

[87] Speranskaya asked if her son could bear the name Speransky, keep the title, and as was customary, receive her father's pension for six years, but her request was denied.

[88] To prevent her estranged husband from seizing her father's estate, Speranskaya sent their son to a boarding school and in July traveled abroad with their daughter, on the pretext that she needed a spa cure.

[93] She found miserable conditions – starvation due to famine and bad harvests, as well as rampant disease, such as dysentery, scurvy and whooping cough.

[94] She immediately took measures to rectify the situation bringing in wheat, meat, and vegetables and setting up child care centers and orphanages to serve children whose parents were unable to provide for them.

By hiring master craftsmen to train the local peasants as apprentices, she was able to restore the brewery and the stables, and to establish not only a brickyard, carpentry shop, distillery, forge, saltpetre factory, and a sawmill, but also windmills, watermills, and a spinning mill.

In July 1850, she reached an agreement with her daughter whereby the Cantacuzènes could take over the estate on condition they shared the profits, while she proceeded to Vienna to seek medical treatment.

[109] Despite the tsar's intervention, she often had trouble renewing her residency permit with the Ministry of Justice in Vienna until 1854, when Alexander Gorchakov replaced the previous minister.

She wrote religious texts, travel sketches, stories of life in the Russian Empire, as well as novels, plays, and children's books.

[34] Among her most popular works were Méditations chrétiennes (1853), Les pélerins russes à Jérusalem (Russian Pilgrims in Jerusalem, 1854), Les dernières heures de l'empereur Nicolas (The Last Hours of Emperor Nicholas, 1855), La vie de château en Ukraine (Life in the Ukrainian Chateau, 1857), Le Starower et sa fille (The Old Believer and His Daughter, 1857), Une Famille Toungouse (A Tunguz Family, 1857) and Les îles de la Néva à St. Pétersbourg (The Islands of the Neva in Saint Petersburg, 1858).

[118] Une Famille Toungouse related her experiences in Siberia and spoke of the customs of the Evenk people and their encounters and clashes with Christians and Cossacks who traveled to their traditional homelands, uprooting their nomadic lives.

[132][133] According to scholars Raeff and Sara Dickinson, Tolstoy made an unfavorable caricature of Speransky and depicted Bagréeff-Speransky as a lonely child, who lacked her father's attention.

[34][134] Raeff maintained Tolstoy's depiction of Speransky was incorrect,[135] while Dickinson emphasized that letters exchanged between father and daughter showed that even during their periods of separation, they had a close and affectionate relationship.

[34] Duret edited and posthumously published her reflections and diary, written between 1845 and her death, under the title "Le livre d'une femme" ("A Woman's Book") for the first time in 1867.

[59] Daniil Mordovtsev included a chapter on her in his book Русские женщины Нового времени (Russian Women of Modern Times, 1874), which covered correspondence from Bagréeff-Speransky and her father.