Öz
This paper aims to compare Halide Edib, Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf’s response to the historical and cultural heritage of Istanbul and show how this response varies according to gender and discipline rather than nationality. It compares Leonard Woolf’s political tract The Future of Constantinople (1917), against representations of Istanbul in Virginia Woolf’s novels and her 1906 memoir The Passionate Apprentice, and Halide Edib’s response to the British Occupation in The Turkish Ordeal(1928). It identifies common literary impressionist and modernist techniques of using the play of light and water, and polyphony, in determining the atmosphere of the city being described. Drawing from her journal entries the article argues that since Virginia Woolf visited Istanbul in her formative years, her method of approaching the modern city in her oevre has been influenced by Istanbul. The elements that awakened Virginia Woolf to literary impressionism are then compared with and verified by the local author, Halide Edib, who manages to combine her literary and political modernism in narrating a new Turkish subjectivity.