Maryana bint Fathallah bin Nasrallah Marrash (Arabic: , ; 1848–1919), also known as Maryana al-Marrash or Maryana Marrash al-Halabiyah, was a Syrian writer and poet of the Nahda or the Arab Renaissance. She revived the tradition of literary salons in the Arab world and was the first Syrian woman to publish a collection of poetry. She may have been the first woman to write in the Arabic-language daily newspapers. Life Background and education Maryana Marrash was born in Aleppo, a city of Ottoman Syria (present-day Syria), to an old Melkite family of merchants known for their literary interests. Having earned wealth and standing in the 18th century, the family was well established in Aleppo, although they had gone through troubles: a relative of Maryana, Butrus Marrash, was killed by the walis troops in the midst of a Catholic–Orthodox clash in April 1818. Other Melkite Catholics were exiled from Aleppo during the persecutions, among them the priest Jibrail Marrash. Maryana's father, Fathallah, tried to defuse the sectarian conflict by writing a treatise in 1849, in which he rejected the Filioque. He had built up a large private library to give his three children Francis, Abdallah and Maryana a thorough education, particularly in the field of Arabic language and literature. As worded by Marilyn Booth, Maryana's mother was from "the famous al-Antaki family", related to Archbishop Demetrius Antachi. Aleppo was then a major intellectual center of the Ottoman Empire, featuring many thinkers and writers concerned with the future of the Arabs. It was in the French missionary schools that the Marrash family learnt Arabic with French, and other foreign languages (Italian and English). By providing their daughter with an education, at a time when Eastern Mediterranean women received none, Maryana's parents challenged the then widespread belief that a girl should not be educated "so she would not sit in the men's reception room", as quoted by Marilyn Booth. Thus, Fathallah put his five-year-old daughter in a Maronite school. Later on, Maryana was educated by the nuns of St. Joseph in Aleppo. She finally went to an English school in Beirut. In addition to her formal education in these schools, where she was exposed to French and Anglo-Saxon cultures, she was tutored by her father and brothers, especially on the subject of Arabic literature. The first biographies of Maryana mention that she excelled in French, Arabic and mathematics, and that she played the