Halide Edip: Pillar of Turkish literature

Commemorated on the 57th anniversary of her passing on Jan. 9, 1964, Halide Edip Adıvar was a literary giant as the author of the first war novel in Turkish literature, as well as one of Anadolu Agency's founders.

Born in 1884, Halide Edip spent her childhood at her grandparents' house, which later became an inspiration for one of her acclaimed works, House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Turkey Old and New.

Adıvar attended the American College for Girls in Istanbul in 1893 but was later forced to drop out and was home-schooled by private tutors on topics including Arabic, English, French and music.

Encouraged by her English teacher, she translated Mother, by John Abbot, into Turkish, for which she would be awarded the Order of Charity by Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II.

In 1899, she returned to the American college and graduated in 1901. In the same year, she married her mathematics teacher Salih Zeki and had two children.

Halide Edip began to write under the pseudonym Halide Salih for the Tanin newspaper, founded by poet Tevfik Fikret, who was also a foundational name in modern Turkish poetry, and continued to write for other publications.

Receiving threats due to her articles, the young woman departed to Egypt after fearing for her life during an uprising in 1909, but returned to Istanbul later that year.

Continuing her writing, she decided to divorce Salih Zeki the next year for wanting to take a second wife. Later, in 1917, she married Adnan Adıvar.

At the instruction of the then-education minister, she started teaching at schools for girls and served as an inspector for private schools. In this period, her observations in the Istanbul suburbs inspired her to write the novel Sinekli Bakkal, later published in...