The Lebanese immigrant writer, journalist, and translator ‘Afifa Karam (1883-1924) was a key contributor to the Arabic cultural renaissance, or the nahda. An early voice calling attention to the situation of Arab women, Karam was a staunch advocate for women’s rights to education, to work, to travel, for self-expression, and to decide on their life partners. Karam chose fiction as her preferred means of promoting women’s empowerment and liberation, and she published groundbreaking Arabic novels in New York City between 1906-1910, at a time when few such novels had been written. Karam’s romance novels took on such subjects as honor killings, interreligious marriages, and veiling practices. Nevertheless, despite her landmark accomplishments and the accolades she was accorded during her lifetime, there is a little extant documentation about Karam’s life. Personal papers were not preserved; family members who might have been able to provide oral histories have died; primary and secondary source materials are negligible. As happened with many of her women contemporaries, Karam’s life and work was kept “alive” in survey-style texts or biographical dictionaries. By and large, Karam’s legacy was summarized in and circumscribed by short, recycled, often inaccurate biographical sketches. Long-form biographies, it would seem, were reserved for her male contemporaries. Understanding of great women’s lives has been greatly limited by fragmentation, lack of attention, in the end, by the gendered dynamics and processes of historiography. Karam’s life is well worth investigating and analyzing to deepen understanding of the Lebanese and Arab diaspora (mahjar) of the early 20th century, and its impact on the nahda. But because of the lacunae in material, and the biases in what is available, a traditional straightforward approach to biography cannot provide the insights we are looking for. This provokes a variety of methodological questions. How ought scholars approach the writing of biographies of marginalized groups? What creative methodological strategies could, or should, be used, when primary source materials are scarce and existing biographical accounts are shaded by gender (or other) biases, and therefore, require critical interpretation? What is the validity of employing speculative methods, such as of reconstructing the biography of an individual through analyses of their published works? These methods can not only reconstruct a life, but have revolutionary potential to rewrite dominant historical, social and political narratives.