[5] Born in Nazareth, Palestine to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother,[6][7][8] Ziadeh attended school in her native city and in Lebanon, before immigrating along with her family to Egypt in 1908.

As her father came to the Keserwan region of Mount Lebanon, she was sent at the age of 14 to Aintoura to pursue her secondary studies at a French convent school for girls.

[2] Ziadeh never married,[1] but from 1912 onward, she maintained an extensive written correspondence with one of the literary giants of the twentieth century, the Lebanese-American poet and writer Khalil Gibran.

[12] Ziadeh was profoundly humiliated and incensed by this decision; she eventually recovered and left after a medical report proved that she was of sound mental health.

[1] As a result, Ziadeh was completely bilingual in Arabic and French, and had working knowledge of English, Italian, German, Syriac (as an integral part of her ethnoreligious Lebanese Maronite identity), Spanish, Latin, as well as Modern Greek.

Among those that frequented the salon were Taha Hussein, Khalil Moutrane, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, Anton Gemayel [ar; arz; fa], Walieddine Yakan, Abbas el-Akkad and Yaqub Sarruf.

[2] In 1921, she convened a conference under the heading, "Le but de la vie" ("The goal of life"), where she called upon Middle Eastern women to aspire toward freedom, and to be open to the Occident without forgetting their Oriental identity.

[2] Ziadeh's first published work, Fleurs de rêve (1911), was a volume of poetry, written in French, using the pen name of Isis Copia.

She translated several European authors into Arabic, including Arthur Conan Doyle from English, Brada (the Italian Contessa Henriette Consuelo di Puliga) from French, and Max Müller from German.

[25] Well noted titles of her works in Arabic (with English translation in brackets) include: - Bâhithat el-Bâdiya باحثة البادية ("Seeker in the Desert", pen name of Malak Hifni Nasif) - Sawâneh fatât سوانح فتاة (Platters of Crumbs) - Zulumât wa Ichâ'ât ظلمات وإشاعات (Humiliation and Rumors...) - Kalimât wa Ichârât كلمات وإشارات (Words and Signs) - Al Saha'ef الصحائف (The Newspapers) - Ghayat Al-Hayât غاية الحياة (The Meaning of Life) - Al-Musâwât المساواة (Equality) - Bayna l-Jazri wa l-Madd بين الجزر والمد (Between the Ebb and Flow) Ziadeh is considered by many as integral to the feminist movement having published many autobiographies of women between 1919-1925, this was part of her advocacy for the empowerment of women, examples of women featured in her work include Egyptian feminist Malak Hifni Nassef in her book Bahithat-ul-Badia.

[9][27] Her fiction often included strong female characters and discussed the condition of Middle Eastern women, for example in one of her short stories, she illustrates the evil of frequent divorce and remarriage which she blames on men and patriarchal society.