SOURCE: Hitchcott, Nicki. Review of A Daughter of Isis, by Nawal El Saadawi. Journal of Modern African Studies 38, no. 4 (December 2000): 722-23.

In the following review, Hitchcott compliments the wealth of information about El Saadawi's life and family contained in A Daughter of Isis.

In her fictional writings, Nawal El Saadawi emphasises the need for women to become the subjects of their own stories, to speak in their own words and thus to create their own meanings out of their lives. Now, in her autobiography [A Daughter of Isis], Saadawi begins to construct herself as subject of her own fascinating story. Recognised throughout the world as an Arab woman who refuses to be silenced, Saadawi chooses not to describe the imprisonment she endured under President Sadat in 1981, nor does she focus on the fundamentalist death threat she suffered in 1992 which led to her five-year exile in the USA. Instead...