It has been stated by many writers that the cause of the unhappy life led by the Drapers at Bombay was the fault of Sterne, whose insidious flatteries undermined the lady’s moral rectitude. This, not to put too fine a point on it, is a conclusion as absurd as it is unwarrantable. Mrs Draper was far too intelligent not to realise that Sterne was a sentimentalist, and not to understand that such allusions as to her being his second wife were, if in bad taste, at least meant to be playful, seeing that he was, and knew he was, standing on the threshold of the valley of the shadow of death. Mrs Draper left her husband six years after she had said farewell to Sterne, not because of the author’s influence on her, but because her patience, weakened by a long course of unkind behaviour, was finally outraged by her husband’s obvious partiality for her maid, Mrs Leeds. She had long desired to leave Draper, and now a legitimate excuse was furnished, which in the eyes of all unprejudiced persons justified the step.
Draper, who seems to have had some suspicion of her intention, watched her closely, and for a while it was impossible for her to get away. At last she escaped from Mazagon on board a King’s cutter, and it was stated that she had eloped with one of her admirers, Sir John Clark. The truth was that she accepted his escort to the house of her uncle, Thomas Whitehall, who lived at Masulipatam.
MRS DRAPER TO THOMAS MATHEW SCLATER
“Rajahmundy, 80 miles from Masulipatam,
“January 20th, 1774.
“... I will let you into my present situation. I live entirely with my uncle, and I shall continue to do so to the last hour of my life if he continues to wish it as much as he does at present.”
Whether her uncle did not continue to desire her company, or whether she tired of the life, cannot be determined, but later, in the year 1774, Mrs Draper returned to England. There she took up her friendship with the Jameses from the point at which it had been interrupted by her departure seven years earlier for India, and she was soon the centre of a distinguished circle. The publication, in 1775, of some of Sterne’s letters to her made her somewhat unpleasantly notorious, and she withdrew from London to the comparative seclusion of Bristol, where she remained until her death, three years later. She was buried in Bristol Cathedral, where a monument, depicting two classical figures bending over a shield, one bearing a torch, the other a dove, was erected in her honour. The shield bore the inscription:
Sacred
To the Memory
of
Mrs Eliza Draper,
in whom
Genius and Benevolence
were united.
She died August 3, 1778,
aged 35.