The book depicts life in the Egyptian countryside and delves into the traditional romantic and marital relationships between men and women and the interactions between the laboring cotton worker and plantation owner classes.
Haykal, son of rural land owners himself, had spent considerable time in France, where he was studying to be a lawyer, and it was actually at this point that he wrote Zaynab in 1911.
Notably in the first publication, the author chose the pseudonym Masri Fallah ("An Egyptian Peasant"), which perhaps underlines the lack of prestige attached to the genre at the time of his writing.
Originally intended to be a short story, Haykal found that his work had more mileage than he had first appreciated, becoming a full novel in three parts.
An early liberal critique of arranged marriage, the veil and enforced seclusion of women, the novel ends tragically with the heroine's psychological deterioration and death by "consumption."