May Ziadeh

May Elias Ziadeh ( ; , ; 11 February 1886 – 17 October 1941) was a Lebanese-Palestinian Maronite poet, essayist, and translator, who wrote many different works both in Arabic and in French.

Born in Nazareth, Palestine to a Lebanese father and a Palestinian mother, Ziadeh attended school in her native city and in Lebanon, before immigrating along with her family to Egypt in 1908. She started publishing her works in French (under the pen name Isis Copia) in 1911, and Kahlil Gibran entered into a correspondence with her in 1912. Being a prolific writer, she wrote for Arabic-language newspapers and periodicals, along with publishing poems and books. May Elias Ziadeh held one of the most famous literary salons in the modern Arab world in the year 1921. After suffering some personal losses at the beginning of the 1930s, she came back to Lebanon where her relatives placed her in a psychiatric hospital. After a hunger strike and a public campaign for her release, she was able to leave the hospital in 1938. Shortly after, she moved to Cairo where she later died.

Ziadeh was one of the key figures of the Nahda in the early 20th-century Middle Eastern literary scene and a "pioneer of Oriental feminism." settled in the early 19th century She was born in Nazareth, Ottoman Palestine. She attended several Roman Catholic schools in Lebanon before returning to Nazareth in the year 1904 to be with her parents.

Ziadeh was particularly interested in learning languages. She studied privately at home alongside her French-Catholic education, and later at a local university for a Modern Languages degree while in Egypt. She graduated in 1917.

Romanticism Bearing a romantic streak from childhood, Ziadeh was successively influenced by Lamartine, Byron, Shelley, and finally Gibran. These influences are evident in the majority of her works. She often reflected on her nostalgia for Lebanon and her fertile, vibrant, sensitive imagination is as evident as her mystery, melancholy and despair. She was credited as being the first woman to use the term "women's cause" in the Middle East according to critic Hossam Aql, "She was the first professional writer to take a critical approach to women's stories or novels". Her fiction often included strong female characters and discussed the condition of Middle Eastern women, for example in one of her short stories, she illustrates the evil of frequent divorce and remarriage which she blames on men and patriarchal society.

Other "Goodbye Lebanon", trans. Rose DeMaris In Virginia's Sisters: An Anthology of Women's Writings, London: Aurora Metro Books, 2023.