A study of the career and writings of Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1860-1914) an early feminist thinker and writer in Egypt. It focuses on her newspaper essays, novels, poetry, and her play which was the first to be published by a female author in Arabic.

Marilyn Booth earned her doctorate in Middle East History and Modern Arabic Literature from St Antony's College, University of Oxford. She has taught at American University in Cairo, the University of Illinois, Brown University, University of Edinburgh as Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies, and currently, Magdalen College and the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford as Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Chair. She has published books and essays on intersections of gender history, Arabic literature, and women's writing in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Egypt, and is a prize-winning literary translator and co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

• Introduction: Feminism, Communities, and Zaynab Fawwaz


• Part I: Lives and Texts


• 1: Formations: A Birthplace, a Family, a Voyage


• 2: Egyptian Connections and the Nationalist Press


• Part II: Zaynab Fawwaz Efendi, 'Bearer of the Banner of Justice'


• 3: Social justice and activist subjects


• 4: Fawwaz in al-Fatat


• 5: Marriage and silences


• 6: 'This tyranny you have called Nature': Misogyny and/as science


• 7: Education: Not 'whether' but 'why'


• 8: Gender solidarity and patriotic disillusion: The politics of 1900


• Part III: Politics of Romance: Fictions, Histories, and Feminine Voices


• 9: Good consequences, feminine choices: Public politics and the rights of the young (1895/1899)


• 10: Theatre and Morality, Passion and Fidelity (1893)


• 11: Cyrus the Great in 1905: Rewriting Herodotus in the feminine


• Part IV: Fin de siècle


• Later life


• Bibliography