Women in Egypt began publishing their writing under their own names in the 1880s, as nationalist newspapers and other forms of print media were emerging with new vigour, following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. To sign with a feminine signature was already daring: but to write openly about one's own life and self, in a society where urban women of the middling and upper strata were generally sequestered in domestic space or in closed carriages, was beyond the pale. This book elicits autobiographical writing by women in Egypt of Turkish, Turkish-Egyptian, Egyptian, and Ottoman-Syrian identity through a variety of 'non-autobiographical' genres: biography, poetry, fiction, personal essays and conduct books. Drawing on the most recent theoretical and critical approaches to the study of autobiography, Marilyn Booth shows how women used these forms of writing to express themselves and to talk about their lives.