Journalist and feminist, Grace Ellison was a strong Turkophile who publicized the cause of Turkish women in newspaper articles written from within ‘a Turkish harem’. She met Zeyneb Hanim, daughter of a government minister, in Istanbul in 1905. Zeyneb and her sister Melek had organised dinners in their home to discuss women's rights until forbidden by the government. The restless sisters then wrote to the French author Pierre Loti, who met them clandestinely and incorporated their stories into his sentimental novel, Les Désenchantées. Subsequently, Ellison visited the sisters in Paris where they had fled in fear of their lives. Together with Zeyneb she co-authored A Turkish Woman's European Impressions (1913). In the introduction Ellison wrote: ‘I, who through the veil have studied the aimless, unhealthy existences of these pampered women, am nevertheless convinced that the civilization of Western Europe for Turkish women is a case of exchanging the frying-pan for the fire.’ In An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (1915), published in The Daily Telegraph in the form of ‘letters home’, she described the sequestered day-to-day existence she led in the house of another Turkish friend, Makboulé Hanim, who she called Fatima. Ellison took pains to deconstruct the misconceptions of her fellow countrymen about the lives of Eastern women – she wrote she had been told not to use the word ‘harem’ in a public lecture because it might raise audience expectation of ‘improper revelations’. Nevertheless, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem retains the word in its title and includes a photograph of the author as a veiled Turkish woman.