In 1883, a forty-two years old Armenian woman, Srpuhi Dussap (1841-1901), published the first Ottoman woman novel, Mayda, in Constantinople. Mayda gained attention from intellectuals immediately because of its feminist content and Dussap received a great amount of criticism from male writers, who refuse to see her novel as a representation of Armenian women and society. Dussap was not a new voice in the literary world of Constantinople. She was well known among Armenian intelligentsia. She published several articles about female education, emancipation and employment before she published Mayda, she hosted salon intellectual meetings with her French musician husband, and she was the head of the School Loving Armenian Women’s Association. I claim that Dussap’s occupying male dominated literary sphere with the choice of epistolary novel was her deliberate intention. She was influenced by romantic writers such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Milton, Byron and Schiller and the epistolary novels of women writers, who had used this genre to assert the impossibility of saying what women feel since 18th century. In this paper, first, I analyze how she produced distinctly political, intimate and disruptive space to talk about the issues such as sexuality, feminine desire, partner choice and the natural world harmony of the sexes by using the letters of two close female friends. Then, I examine how she challenged the previous presentation of women image in the literary space of male writers by confessing secretive emotions of women, and presenting a new woman image, which was becoming more accepted within the modernized social sphere of the Empire. Finally, I will re-visit the impact of her work on the literary space during that time by discussing how male critics defended their old-fashioned discourses on gender, sexuality and identity of women. Additionally, I believe that Ottoman literary historiography in general has falsely viewed the variety of languages in the Empire as a barrier to textual transmission between its different ethnic groups, and failed to capture the multiplicity of Ottoman linguistic sources. By overcoming the traditional approaches towards Ottoman women's literature and linguistic difficulties, I suggest that Dussap was an Ottoman woman novelist, who voiced her sexual difference within the male dominated literary sphere for the first time and inspired the following generation. Note:The first Ottoman-Turkish woman novelist Fatma Aliye published her first novel Muhâderât (Virtuous Ladies) in 1892.