Abstract
The novel Marta, written by Eliza Orzeszkowa, an outstanding Polish novelist, centers on the struggle for a decent life by a young widow from the landed gentry with a little daughter whose social status diminishes to poverty because of lack of financial resources after the death of her husband in Russian occupied Poland. In her book, Orzeszkowa narrates the somber portrayal of a woman striving to expand her conventional education and provide her child with basic economic needs by trying unsuccessfully various types of work while facing her own powerlessness and the callousness and insensitivity of the world surrounding her. Orzeszkowa’s novel offers interesting insights on labor history in partitioned Poland, especially the types of limited work available to women from the upper class in teaching foreign languages, music, and art, in contrast to the marketable skills of women from working class families who could find jobs more easily performing heavy housework as maids and caregivers at wealthy households or working independently as seamstresses in garment industries. By creating heart-rending and stirring scenes in her fiction, Eliza Orzeszkowa points in her book to the issues that were crucial to her, and that still exist in every corner of the world, namely women’s education, women’s rights to work, women’s equal rights, and women’s independence.
