A prominent novelist, social activist, journalist, and nationalist, Halide Edib Adivar (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. Memoirs is the first book in her two volume English-language autobiography published in 1926, whilst she and her second husband Dr. Adnan were in exile in London and Paris having fallen out of favor with Mustafa Kemal's one-party regime. In it Edib describes her childhood, her confrontation with her first husband's polygyny, her divorce, and her entry into political and literary writing. Providing an account of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Balkan and First World Wars, and ending with the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Edib explains her philosophy of pacifist nationalism, and her ideas on Islam and Islamic civilisation. Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality.
