BRILLIANT TURKISH WOMAN

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6843, 22 February 1929, Page 11

BRILLIANT TURKISH WOMAN

Halide Edib Hanum, who has just gone to the United States to be the first woman to lecture at the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, Massachusetts, is one of the most striking women in Turkish history. Her public life has been so striking that it is apt to overshadow her personal life. The life and spirits pent up within her found expression in a precocious vein of mysticism. In the seclusion of the harem after her marriage to Salih Zeki Bey, she collaborated with her brilliant husband in his enormous project, the Turkish mathematical dictionary, and devoured literature, both Turkish and Western, finding her greatest satisfaction in French literature and her own master ill Zola. On the crest of the 1908 revolution she sprang into fame with a patriotic poem purporting to be her address from Oth* man, founder of the Empire, to the Fourth Army Corps, which brought about the revolution. In 1910 her husband married a second wife. Confronted with polygamy in her own home, she sougth a divorce and began earning her own living with two small sons to support. Her first novel "Ruined Temples,’;’ was published in 1910. Her second, "Handan, ” published in 1911, became extremely popular. Her third, "New Turan, ” a semi-political novel written on her second visit to London in 1912, became a colossal success, a political gospel which flamed across Turkey and ii translations across the Middle East to Tashkent and Kabul., Her interest in education as a means of reform sent her into school work before the war, and again in 1910 when Djemal Pasha asked her to organise new schools in Syria in place of the French schools he had closed.

In 1917 she married Dr. Ad nan Bey, of the Bed Crescent and the army medical service, later Speaker of the National Assembly in Angora. They remained in Anatolia until after the Smyrna trials of 1924, when Mustapha into an apparently permanent dictatorship, and the remnants of the Parliamentary Opposition left. Now she and her husband are exiles.