“Nine years ago I formed the notion of recording some episodes from my life for my children, who had previously known nothing of my background other than that I was an Arab and hailed from Zanzibar.” This is how Emily Ruete begins her Memoirs of an Arabian Princess, the earliest published autobiography of an Arab woman. First published in 1886 by H. Rosenberg (Berlin), and later that year by Friedrich Luckhardt, the memoirs went through four print runs in one year. 2011 saw the 125th anniversary of Emily Ruete’s book, which has increasingly been re-evoked, reprinted and “retold” in recent years, and which seems destined for a long and colourful afterlife.
