She was born in Milkowszczyzna (then in the Russian Empire, now in Belarus) to a noble Pawłowski family, and died in Grodno (now in Belarus) nearby. From 1852 to 1857, she lived in Warsaw, where she attended school. There she met another future Polish writer Maria Konopnicka. After returning to Milkowszczyzna, at the age of sixteen, Eliza married Piotr Orzeszko, a Polish nobleman twice her own age, who was exiled to Siberia after the January Uprising of 1863. They were legally separated in 1869. She married again in 1894, after a 30-year-long loving relationship with Stanisław Nahorski, who died a few years later. In 1866, she moved to Grodno and turned novelist.