May Ziade

May Elias Ziadeh (11 February 1886 – 17 October 1941) was a Lebanese-Palestinian poet, essayist and translator who wrote in Arabic and French, and a key figure of the Nahda and a pioneer of Arab feminism. She held one of the most famous literary salons of the modern Arab world in Cairo. ^{1 2}

She was born in Nazareth, in Ottoman Palestine, as Marie Elias Ziadeh, choosing the name May for herself; her father Elias, a teacher and editor, was a Lebanese Maronite from Chahtoul, and her mother Nuzha was a Palestinian Christian. ^{1 2} She attended primary school in Nazareth and, from the age of fourteen, French convent schools in Lebanon, which exposed her to French and Romantic literature. She mastered nine languages, and published her first articles at sixteen. In 1908 she immigrated with her family to Egypt. ^{1 2}

She began publishing in French in 1911 under the pen name Isis Copia. From 1912 she corresponded with Khalil Gibran; although the pair never met, the correspondence lasted nineteen years, until his death in 1931. In 1921 she began the literary salon that made her a centre of Cairo's intellectual life. ¹

Between 1928 and 1932 she suffered a series of personal losses — her parents, friends, and above all Gibran — and fell into a deep depression. Returning to Lebanon, her relatives placed her in a psychiatric hospital; after a hunger strike and a public campaign for her release, she was able to leave in 1938. She moved back to Cairo, where she died on 17 October 1941. ^{1 2}

The English article's lead calls her personally a Maronite poet. The Arabic article names only her father as a Maronite and files her under Maronite and Christian categories, and Wikidata carries no religion value. One text tradition is not enough for this museum's two-source bar, so her faith is recorded as unknown, with the evidence preserved in her data record. ^{1 2 3}