Introduction to the Reprint: Iconic Disenchantment: Evaluating Femininity in the East and West

This essay introduces the re-issue of Zeyneb Hanoum’s 1913 volume, reprinted as part of the series Cultures in Dialogue. Conceived by myself and developed with Professor Teresa Heffernan (St Mary’s University, Canada), the series is directive in its re-visioning of the field of middle-eastern women’s cultural history. Returning to print memoir and travel writing by women from and about the Ottoman Empire, Series One has 11 volumes, with critical introductions from researchers from Greece, Turkey, Germany, USA, Canada and the UK. My essay extends my research on Zeyneb Hanoum, a key figure in my monograph 'Rethinking Orientalism'. This article focuses on the production of Zeyneb Hanoum’s book, analysing her relationship with her editor, the British feminist Grace Ellison, to argue that the interrogative and collaborative nature of the publication determines the style and structure of the narrative. The primary and secondary research undertaken to identify books for inclusion in the series gave me new insights into how to approach Zeyneb Hanoum’s problematic text – sometimes dismissed as trivial and too highly subjective. New primary material, from Ellison’s other publications, contemporary reviews, and other Western and Ottoman women writers, allowed me to locate Zeyneb Hanoum more closely to her contemporaries. Emphasising the interactive nature of her book, my historicised textual analysis demonstrates that she was part of a network of middle-eastern women whose dialogue with Western women was contestatory and evaluative, rather than emulative and passive. This repositions Zeyneb Haoum’s life-writing as part of the pattern of women’s critical engagement with cultural difference, which was a factor in the development of Western and non-Western modernities