In 1897, Lebanese Maronite ‘Afifa Karam (1883-1924) arrived in America as a bride of fourteen. Eight years later, she would emerge as the first Arab American woman journalist and novelist, and one of the first Arab novelists of either sex or any nationality. Karam’s Arabic writings, published in New York City’s “Little Syria” in the first decade of the 20th century, were addressed primarily to her Syrian immigrant “sisters.” Having lived in both Lebanon and the United States, Karam’s novels offered her readers useful insight about how to navigate life in America, exploring women’s issues through a comparative lens. In her works, the author articulated a bold proto-feminist politics and poetics, highlighting what she saw as the primary sources of women’s oppression in both Arab and American societies. Published in the most influential Arabic-language newspaper of the day, Karam considered her serialized fiction as a powerful platform for civic education and change and she used the actions and fate of her characters to illustrate her points. This paper will explore one particular facet of Karam’s fiction, namely the intimate bonds between her women characters. In each of her three novels, Badi‘a wa Fu’ad (Badi’a and Fu’ad, 1906), Fatima al-Badawiyya (Fatima the Bedouin, 1908), and Ghadat ‘Amshit (The Girl from Amshit, 1910), it is the heroine’s relationship to another woman that sustains and ultimately saves her. In this surprising twist on the traditional romance, it is the love between women that dominates the narrative space of her novels. By demonstrating that women can indeed exist outside of their relationships with men, Karam creates an alternative model of gender relations, while simultaneously exploring the complex intersections of gender, class, religion, and race within the first Arab immigrant community in the United States. Despite the fact that Karam’s novels emerged well before the novel was accepted as a canonical genre of Arabic literature, she has not been acknowledged as an important contributor to the evolution of modern Arabic fiction. I argue that because was a woman, writing inaugural Arabic fiction, in the mahjar, Karam has been triply marginalized. As the first full-length study of this pioneering Arab woman writer, this research strives to broaden our understanding of the scope of Arabic cultural production at the turn of the twentieth century.