Jelena Dimitrijević

Jelena Dimitrijević (27 March 1862 – 10 April 1945) was a Serbian short story writer, novelist, poet, traveller, social worker, feminist, and a polyglot.

From an early age, she dedicated herself to writing – notwithstanding a childhood eye injury that forced her to leave school, and against medical advice forbidding her to read.

Such portraits are a valuable counter to the narrow conceptions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism which sees it firmly rooted in north-west Europe and North America.

For example, "Jelena was proud to have met Mrs Hoda Sha’arawi, the founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union;[4] an encounter she wrote about in great detail in her acclaimed 1940 travelogue Sedam mora i tri okeana (Seven Seas and Three Oceans) which deals with her travels across the Near East[6][7] Her most important novel Nove (New Women) deals with the dilemmas facing educated Muslim women in the twentieth century in relation to their traditional way of life.

She also wrote lyric poetry as well as novels, but is possibly most famous for her Pisma iz Nisa o Haremima, a semi-fictionalised, semi-historical, anthropological narrative containing portraits of life in the Turkish harems 50 years before her birth when the south-Serbian city of Niš was still a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Pisma iz Soluna/Letters from Salonica, a genuine travelogue from the Ottoman Empire during the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, of which Salonica was the centre.