Bir Kadın Biyografisi Olarak Fatma Aliye Hanım yahut Bir Muharrire-i Osmaniye’ni

From the mid-19th century onwards, measures taken to include women in the modernization project began to bear fruit only at the end of the century. The participation of women as writers in the world of literature and the press can be considered as a result of this modernization movement. In such a period, the presentation of Fatma Aliye Hanım’s biography has multiple meanings in terms of both its writing and its content. Fatma Aliye Hanım or the Emergence of an Ottoman Woman of Letters, written by Ahmet Mithat Efendi, was published in 1896. It is known as the first biography by a female author in the Ottoman world. It has maintained this characteristic for many years. In this study, in order to define the text, first of all, the writing, publication and features of Fatma Aliye Hanım or the Emergence of an Ottoman Woman of Letters are emphasized. Meanwhile, some issues were clarified based on the correspondence between Fatma Aliye Hanım and Ahmet Mithat Efendi. However, the main problematic of the study is to reveal the subject matter of a woman in biography, which was a completely masculine genre at the time it was written. In this context, the text was analyzed as a biography of a woman written by a male author in a period with masculine characteristics, and an evaluation was made based on its possibilities, impossibilities, limitations and achievements.