فتاة مصرFatat Misr

The novel

Ya’qub Sarruf¹ wrote Fatat Misr for al-Muqtataf, where it ran in parts before it came out as a book, and the book sold out within its first year. It opens in London, in the house of Sir Edward Brown, owner of the London News, whose son Henry and daughter Dora are about to set out on a year’s journey east. By the third chapter they are in Cairo.

The title page calls it “entertaining, improving, social and civilisational”,² and promises “a full inquiry into the causes of the war between the Russians and the Japanese”.

The 1905 printing

The edition follows the reissue that his brother Ishaq Sarruf³ arranged in 1905 at Matba’at al-Ma’arif in Cairo: five pages of front matter, numbered in letters, and 187 pages of text.⁴ Ishaq’s preface quotes at length a review by Jabr Dumit, who taught Arabic at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut and had read the novel in parts as it came out.

This edition

The text is transcribed line for line from the scan of the Toronto copy, exactly as printed. The reading text is made from that transcription by rules that the introduction states: the author’s words stay as they are, the printer’s spellings of hamza and final ya are brought into line, and light punctuation is added.⁵ Notes in the margin explain the people, places and events that a reader in 1905 knew, from the Boer War to the war between Russia and Japan.

The introduction covers Sarruf and al-Muqtataf, the novel’s success, and how it was read, including by critics who saw it as taking the side of the British occupation.

The first page

The novel’s first paragraph as the 1905 printing has it, set in the house style. The notes for the edition are still to be written; the one beside it shows their form.