Poet (b.
1842, Trabzon - d. 1911, İstanbul). She was the daughter of Hazinedarzade
Abdullah Paşa who was a governor of Trabzon. She came to İstanbul with her
family when she was four years old. In İstanbul, she was tutored by the famous
tutors of the time in Arabic, Persian, calligraphy, prose and the Koran. After
marriage her education continued with her mother. Her father's clerk Pertev
Paşa influenced her greatly to write poetry.
As her
first husband, who did not want her to write poetry, was also jealous, her
marriage ended unhappily. After she divorced from her husband, who had cut
her eyelashes to make her less attractive, she married Damat Ferit Paşa's
uncle, the Chief Secretary of the Navy, Mehmet Ali Efendi and lived for a long
time in Bursa. Later on she returned to İstanbul and it is rumored that Fıtnat
Hanım wasn’t happy with her marriage and had a passionate affair with Ahmet
Mithat Efendi. The lovers' correspondence is recounted in the book, “Ahmet
Mithat Efendi and the Poet Fıtnat Hanım” by Hakkı Tarık Us. Her grave is
in Edirnekapı Graveyard.
Fıtnat
Hanım is considered to be one of the most important women of Divan* poetry. She
became well known because of her intelligence and her lyric poems. She prepared
a Divan*, but it was not published. Also, her many works did not survive due to
the fact that they were not published.