May Ziadeh

May Ziadeh (Arabic: مي زيادة; also spelled Ziyadah, Ziade or Ziadeh) was a Palestinian-Lebanese Maronite poet, essayist and translator, born in Nazareth in 1886 and died in Cairo in 1941. She was part of the Nahda, the Arab cultural revival of the early twentieth century, and is often regarded as one of the first feminists in the Arab world. She wrote in both Arabic and French, and her importance lies as much in her output as in the way a woman of letters became a central figure in the intellectual life of her time.

The daughter of a Lebanese father who edited the newspaper al-Mahrusah and a Palestinian mother who loved poetry, she grew up in a household where literature was a constant subject of conversation. She studied at French Catholic schools in Nazareth and Lebanon, where she developed a lasting taste for Romantic literature. Around 1908 she moved with her family to Egypt, and in 1917 she graduated from the Egyptian University, becoming the first Arab woman in its Faculty of Letters. Her first essays in Arabic appeared in her father's paper in 1911, and that same year she published her first poetry collection in French, Fleurs de rêve, under the pen name Isis Copia.

In Cairo she hosted a literary salon that drew writers, teachers and journalists, and she kept up a long correspondence with Khalil Gibran, whom she never met in person. Her articles and lectures were later gathered into volumes of criticism and literature, and she translated European authors into Arabic. She argued for women's education and public participation without giving up their Eastern identity, an idea she set out in a lecture in 1921.

Personal misfortunes came in the late 1920s, with the deaths of her parents and of Gibran. After a severe depression she was confined in Lebanon at the instigation of relatives who wanted to control her property. Her case provoked a public campaign on her behalf, and in 1938 she regained her freedom and returned to Cairo, where she died. Her legacy endures in the history of Arab feminism, in her critique of women's subordination and in her role as an animator of the cultural life of the Nahda.