Fatma Aliye, Scenes of Life, trans. The Translation Attached Translators Collective, and edited by Karolina Dejnicka, Nefise Kahraman, and Yasemin Gamze Mangal. Ottoman Literary Series. (Toronto: Translation Attached, 2025)

Reviewed by: Marilyn Booth, Emerita Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford

Fatma Aliye (1862-1936) is an endlessly fascinating figure. The daughter of an elite Ottoman family, she became a noted commentator on social issues and women’s status in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Her landmark work Nisvan-ı İslam (Women of Islam, 1892) took on Orientalist stereotypes of Ottoman women by staging conversations among Istanbul women and visiting European women in an elite domestic setting. The work was aimed at female Ottoman readers to encourage them as savvy mediators of a carefully thought-out local modernity in a trans-societal conversation among women.[1] When this engaging work came out serially in 1891-2, it was of immediate interest to Arabophone readers: it was translated into Arabic very quickly (serial instalments began coming out while the Ottoman original was still being serially published in Istanbul). Soon after, two French translations appeared. The circulating ‘afterlife’ of Nisvan-ı İslam, not to mention the already-translational cast of the Ottoman text itself, testifies to the intensity of the issues it raised across the region and beyond; the lively media circulation between Ottoman and Arabic; and Fatma Aliye’s wide recognition.

If Nisvan remains her best-known work, Fatma Aliye was also on the scene as a translator-adaptor, novelist, and journalist-essayist.  One of her five single-authored novels, the fourth to appear (in 1898), Scenes of Life was first published serially in a leading women’s magazine with which Fatma Aliye was long active. Like Nisvan-ı İslam, it is staged in conversation: not as reported face-to-face conversations as in Nisvan, but through letters between female friends. Eleven letters are exchanged among five elite Ottoman Muslim women of varying ages and life stages. Perhaps, Fatma Aliye was drawing on a long European tradition of epistolary fiction as a realistic and malleable form for dissecting intimate lives and feelings. But the work is insistently, eloquently local in its language, themes, and polemics.

Like Nisvan-ı İslam, Scenes of Life vividly portrays women’s sociability—friendship as crucial to women’s and girls’ sanity if not their survival in a world shaped by patriarchally honed expectations, discourses, and institutions. The epistolary form enacts this collective survival mechanism well, while allowing distinct narrative perspectives and emotional depth (as pointed out in the introduction by Berrak Burçak). It’s a way to explore intimate affective lives without transgressing the social deterrents to women’s public expression. Awareness of the restrictions on women’s ‘polite’ speech, as a condition of acceptable elite femininity, resounds through the novel—and, as in many European novels, so does the irony of producing private letters as the stuff of published, circulating expression. The form—and the circumspection it both suggests and demolishes—is also autobiographically relevant. Fatma Aliye was a bold writer, yet one who remained cognizant of her status within elite Ottoman Muslim society, and the constraints (as well as advantages) this status placed on her.

Berrak Burçak’s informative introduction sets out Fatma Aliye’s family background and intellectual contributions, and highlights the centrality in this work of questions of marriage in the context of the stakes and expectations involved in elite marriages in late Ottoman society. Fatma Aliye ‘was aware of how such [patriarchal family-controlled] marriages stifled a woman’s individual agency and primarily positioned her as a member of a family that was defined by its male members.’ (xix). The work—and Fatma Aliye’s oeuvre overall—challenged this structure, emphasizing women’s rights to ‘emotional fulfilment and personal happiness, rather than being forced into a life dictated by traditional gender roles’ (xix) and governed by a strict gender hierarchy. The narrators of these letters are bluntly honest about their personal situations, and there is much discussion of the roles of money and education in facilitating greater choice, freedom, and potential happiness for (some) young women. In company with other works by female writers of this era, the work enacts women as articulate social thinkers, as intellectuals.

I am not a reader of Ottoman Turkish and thus I cannot judge the translation against the original. But the English reads beautifully and convincingly, the tone reminiscent for me of the 1892-3 Arabic translation of Nisvan (which I have read and studied). The vibrancy and consistency of tone is particularly impressive since it has been a collaborative, collective venture, conducted ‘through weekly workshops over a year’ (xxiii). The translators strike a balance between the ornate style conventional at the time—which female writers had to show they could produce—and contemporary readability. (The Translators’ Note explains the challenges very well—and explicitly highlights Fatma Aliye’s plurilinguality, a feature of Ottoman writing and—for instance—of Nisvan.)

It is equally impressive that the translation is followed by an edition of the original Ottoman text and a transliteration of that text into the Latin characters of modern Turkish, for readers who cannot follow the Arabic script—and finally, a translation into modern Turkish, thus making the Ottoman text meaningful for Turkophone readers today. This is painstaking work, and it is not simple to produce such a complex, multilingual, multi-script volume. The editors and the press are to be congratulated for undertaking it.

As in the novel genre across Europe, so in Ottoman languages (not only Ottoman Turkish but Arabic, Greek, etc.) marriage was a central theme. Coerced marriages were a plot motivator, but occasionally so were newer formulations which were nevertheless also hemmed in by gender-heirarchized expectations. ‘Companionate marriage’, with an emphasis on mutual understanding, respect, and affection, became a modern ideal for an aspirationally modern elite; and yet, we find in the discourses of the time (fiction and otherwise, and particularly penned by women) that the onus was usually on women to make the necessary emotional and practical compromises, and to bear the brunt of distrustful or coercive attitudes. Some female writers dared to suggest that ‘companionate marriage’ was not much of an improvement for women, even as it made ‘modern’ men look good. (‘For good companionship, it is enough not to feel disgust or hatred,’ says one writer [39]). In the sole novel of the young Beiruti Arabophone intellectual Alis al-Bustani (1870-1926), Sa’iba, a chosen, companionate marriage ends tragically because the well-educated, loving husband cannot in the end respect his wife enough to trust her word.[2]

The epistolary form allowed the author to emphasize how alone women are in their domestic lives, how confined. At the same time, posing letter-writing as an outlet, the form allows a certain amount of polemical reach, touching on hot-button issues such as the dangers of a superficial education (emblematized by many writers of the time, writing in Turkish and Arabic, in the figures of the piano-playing woman and the debauched male dandy). At times careening between polemics and emotional edginess–‘the scorching winds of my poisoned life’, exclaims Fehame to Mehabe (13)—the text can seem overblown. But the characters are sympathetically drawn, and there is a bold honesty in addressing issues such as domestic violence and the cruelty of husbands and family members—such as grandmothers. Through these exchanged monologues, Fatma Aliye reminds us how women, too (young letter-writers, older matriarchs) are shaped by prevailing practices of patriarchal ‘right’. But Fatma Aliye, ventriloquizing these letter-writers, is particularly scathing about masculine behaviours. And, as women write to each other in this text, they also remind each other of the costs of speaking out: one way that patriarchy operates is to blame women for breaking the silences expected of them. (Knowing her husband is likely to arrive at any moment, Fehame reminds herself that she must now lock away the letter she is writing [30]). Women are wise to the system that governs their lives and tongues:

Rather than softening him, the words I used to seek sympathy and evoke his pity only made me seem foolish. Here, such words are dismissed as whining and nagging, and through such behaviour, a woman is deemed deserving of insult and contempt. Although it is impossible not to feel sorrow and suffering in the face of such mistreatment, you cannot weep, speak your mind, voice your grievances, or defend yourself. One thing alone prevents you from doing so: you are a woman, and he is a man.

Do these words seem unfathomable to you? If so, then you are the one being cared for, and he is the caretaker. Do you dare to claim otherwise? Then reach into your pocket and prove it. You cannot? Then be silent. You have no right to speak. Are you hungry, are you without clothes, does your husband not give you an allowance? These are the words that are spoken here. They understand nothing else, nor will they listen to anything else. (38)

And when younger women observe the marriages around them, it intensifies their fears. They are not given a good model by their elders—and it is those elders who often make the choices that will govern these young women’s lives. For, in the final exchanges, the ‘debate’ has moved to the younger generation of women, as they debunk the idea that the ‘well-educated man’ is by definition a good husband, a practitioner of ‘companionate marriage’. The ‘poor wretch’ who is the final letter-writer’s brother, and husband of her interlocutor friend, is seen by both young women as something of a disaster. The letter-writer, still single, dreads marriage. Who’s to say she’ll get anyone better, in this family-engineered world? Scenes of Life ends a bit abruptly; but perhaps this is part of the point. There is no resolution to the life dilemmas these letter-writers invoke, as long as patriarchal attitudes in their natal families persist, a recognition poignantly represented in the final letter.

Marilyn Booth, Magdalen College, University of Oxford

[1] Marilyn Booth and A. Holly Shissler) Fatma Aliye’s Nisvan-ı İslam: Istanbul, Paris, Beirut, Cairo, 1891–96. In Marilyn Booth and Claire Savina (eds), Ottoman Translations Circulating Translations from Bombay to Paris. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 327-88.

Fatma Aliye’s Nisvan-ı İslâm has recently appeared in English as The Women of Islam, translated by Greg Key (Toronto: Translation Attached, 2025).

[2] Sa’iba, by Alis al-Bustani (Beirut, 1891), trans. Marilyn Booth (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2026).