This collection is a scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana (c. 1500–1558) in the European imagination. Roxolana, or ‘Hurrem Sultan’, was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made a career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). These essays represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy. The contributors investigate her image in a variety of sources, ranging from early modern historical chronicles, dramas and travel writings, to twentieth-century historical novels and plays. Also included are six European source texts featuring Roxolana, here translated into modern English. This collection examines Roxolana from both Western and Eastern European perspectives: source material is taken from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Ukraine.
In this book, a combination of literary criticism, literary history, memoir and feminist polemic, the author stages an encounter between the medicalised lives of Jane Bowles, Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald and other modernist wives and mistresses and her own struggles as a young woman and a writer. The author's blog site: http://francesfarmerismysister.blogspot.nl/