Ashrafunnisa Begum (1840–1903) was born in a conservative Muslim household in an obscure village in Bijnor district. Despite many odds, she ingeniously taught herself to read and write and Urdu. These skills served her and her two daughters well when she became a young widow in Lahore. Taking up employment in the Victoria Girls’ School, she devoted her life to teaching those skills to several generations of girls, who long remembered their beloved Ustani Sahiba.

Muhammadi Begum (1877–1908) was the first Muslim woman to edit a journal in Urdu. The weekly, Tahzib-e Niswañ, that she founded in 1898 with her publisher husband, Syed Mumtaz Ali, continued for five decades, and created a remarkable network of female friendship and cooperation across North India. Besides writing extensively for the magazine, she also published novels, children’s books, collections of poems, and a dozen or so books on contemporary domestic and social issues that were of direct relevance to her peers.

C. M. Naim  is Professor Emeritus in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, where he taught for forty years. He founded and edited the Annual of Urdu Studies  from 1981 to 1991. His extensively revised translation of the autobiography of the famous Urdu poet Mir was published as Remembrances  in 2019 in the Murti Classical Library of India. He is presently finishing a book on the first sixty years of Urdu crime fiction.

List of Images
Preface
A Most Noble Life by Muhammadi Begum
Afterword
Three Essays by Ashrafunnisa Begum
   Anger
   The Evils of Pampering
   On Adopting a Child
Muhammadi Begum
Three Essays on Victoria Girls’ School, Lahore
   Victoria Girls’ School, Lahore
   A Visit to the Victoria Girls’ School
   A Special Event at the Victoria Girls’ School
Bibliography