[THE FIRST NOVEL BY A PIONEER TURKISH FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE / GENDER, MARRIAGE AND FEMALE DESIRE IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE] شبابِ تباه / Sebâb-i tebâh [i.e., Wasted youth]

MUHLIS, NEZIHE [MUHIDDIN] (1889-1958).

Muhtar Hâlid Kitabhânesi, Istanbul, AH 1329 = [CE 1911].

Original wrappers. Foolscap 8vo. (18.5 x 12.5 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish in Arabic letters). 84 p. Foxing and staining to the front and rear wrappers, with slight foxing to the final pages.

Exceedingly rare first edition of the first novel by Nezihe Muhiddin, one of the pioneering figures of the Ottoman and Turkish women's movements and later founder of the Women's People's Party (Kadınlar Halk Fırkası). Published during the Second Constitutional period, Şebâb-ı Tebâh marks the beginning of Muhiddin's remarkably prolific literary career and an early literary expression of her engagement with questions of gender, marriage, women's position in society and individual desire, more than a decade before she emerged as one of the leading campaigners for women's political rights in Turkey.

Centred upon Süheyla, her husband Necib, and their childhood friend Fazıl, the novel develops an ultimately tragic triangle of marriage, suppressed desire, loyalty and betrayal. Süheyla's conflict between marital obligation and individual desire brings the private sphere of marriage into the centre of the narrative. Although much of the story is mediated through the male figure of Fazıl, recent scholarship has drawn attention to Muhiddin's use of the male narrator in examining the contradictions of patriarchal gender relations. In this respect, Şebâb-ı Tebâh belongs to the broader emergence of late Ottoman women's fiction in which established conceptions of marriage, female desire and the prescribed social roles of women were increasingly subjected to scrutiny.

Muhiddin wrote Şebâb-ı Tebâh after reading Halide Edip's Seviyye Talip (1910), which she acknowledged as an important stimulus to her own first attempt at the novel. She was also under the influence of Tevfik Fikret's Tarih-i Kadim, Sis and Rücû at the time. The novel thus belongs to a particularly fertile moment in late Ottoman literature, when a generation of women writers was increasingly using fiction to examine marriage, desire and the changing position of women in Ottoman society. Muhiddin herself would go on to produce nearly twenty novels and hundreds of stories, articles, plays and other writings.

Muhiddin's subsequent career gives this youthful novel historical resonance. Her organised involvement in the women's movement developed during the following decade, culminating in 1923, when she led the attempt to establish the Kadınlar Halk Fırkası [i.e., Women's People's Party], an initiative for women's political representation launched even before the proclamation of the Turkish Republic. When official permission for the party was not granted, the movement was reorganised as the Türk Kadınlar Birliği [Turkish Women's Union], of which Muhiddin became a leading figure. Through these organisations, she campaigned for women's political participation and suffrage, becoming one of the central figures of the early women's movement in Turkey.

Sources: Özyildirim 586.; Özege 18659.; As of October 2026, OCLC records only five copies outside Turkey, of which only two are located in American institutions (Princeton and the University of California Southern Regional Library Facility). Tülay Keskin, Nezihe Muhiddin ve Türk Kadını (1931): İnceleme-Metin, Kırıkkale University; Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap: Nezihe Muhiddin, Kadınlar Halk Fırkası, Kadın Birliği, Istanbul: Metis, 2003; Serpil Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi, Istanbul: Metis; Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, s.v. “Nezihe Muhittin”; Atatürk Ansiklopedisi, s.v. “Türk Kadınlar Birliği”.