Description

This is a first edition of a novel about an illegitimate son of Zeyno, a Kurdish beauty and a wife of a medical doctor, and her lover. The novel is set in Diyarbakır in the first years of the Republic and is an insight on the lives of the state officials from Istanbul, who moved to Anatolia on the eve of the Kurdish rebellion.

Halide Edib Adıvar, an esteemed intellectual, author, a political activist, feminist and a member of a resistance, was born as a daughter of a secretary of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II and was educated at home since early age and later at the American College for Girls. After finishing her education, Halide married a mathematician, physicist and astronomer Salih Zeki Bey, whom she divorced in 1910. Seven years later she married Dr. Adnan, a lecturer in literature at Istanbul University’s Faculty of Letters.

During WWI, Halide became active in the national movement and worked as a school inspector in Damascus, Beirut and the Collège Saint Joseph in Mount Lebanon. After the war, the British tried to exile her to Malta as “firebrand and a dangerous agitator“. Halide and her husband escaped to Anatolia to join the Turkish National Resistance, where she worked as a reporter and a fighter, gaining the ranks of first corporal and then sergeant in the nationalist army.

From 1926 until 1939, Halide lived in exile in France and the United Kingdom. After her return she worked as a professor in English literature at the Faculty of Letters in Istanbul, and was a member of the parliament between 1950-1954.

Halide Edib Adıvar is one of the most influential Turkish writers of the 20th century. Throughout her novels she criticized the low status of women in Ottoman and Turkish society and their lack of initiative to change the situation.

References: OCLC 972733137; BDK – ÖZEGE; 23736 – TBTK; 9516.