Shakespeare’s sisters in Istanbul: Grace Ellison and the politics of feminist friendship

Abstract

This article attempts to reconstruct a story of friendship between an English journalist, Grace Ellison, and two Turkish sisters, Zeyneb and Melek Hanoum. The sisters served as Pierre Loti’s models for the main characters of his novel Les Désenchantées. In 1906, they left Istanbul to escape from the oppressive regime of Abdülhamit II and started living in Europe, where they met Ellison. Ellison encouraged them to write, and edited and co-authored their books in English. She pursued Virginia Woolf’s idea of women’s solidarity, working for women whom Woolf might have termed “Shakespeare’s sisters”. Although her friendship with the sisters raises the question of subaltern agency within the discursive domain of orientalism, it cannot be reduced to the binary relationship between orientalism and its silenced Other. Taking the historical context and class background into account, this article argues that what Ellison sought for was an eternally postponed, future friendship between women across cultures, nations and classes.