[1] The only son of Francis Fay of Rotherhithe, Surrey, and of Irish extraction,[3] he intended to practise as an advocate in the Calcutta Supreme Court.
The couple set out for India in April 1779 and he managed to enter himself on 16 June 1780, but he ran into debt and fathered an illegitimate child before returning to England, where he died some time before 1815.
"[5] She appears to have had religious convictions and a distaste for any indelicacy, also a command of French and an ability to learn other languages such as Italian, Portuguese and Hindustani at high speed, but otherwise not much education.
Eliza Fay found her way into Calcutta society during her first period there, meeting several prominent people, including Warren Hastings, but this goodwill may have been dissipated by the wild behaviour of her husband, or possibly by her own ill temper.
This time her social status was lower and she supported herself with a millinery shop and by mantua making, but became bankrupt in 1788, although she continued to trade and paid off her creditors by 1793.
Suttee (immolation of a widow), she opined, was not a proof of feeling, but "entirely a political scheme intended to insure the care and good offices of wives to their husbands.
Returning to England in 1794, Eliza inherited property in Glamorgan on the death of her father and became a merchant, but was dogged by disasters, so that bankruptcy ensued again in 1800.
[10] Later glimpses of her life, including some surviving manuscript pages, and English court and other archive materials,[1] come from notes by her 1908 editor, Walter Kelly Firminger (1870–1940),[11] author of the long-running Thacker's Guide to Calcutta.