My work focuses on the recovery of May Ziadeh, an overlooked Lebanese-Palestinian writer and literary salon hostess from the early twentieth century. I aim to briefly highlight Ziadeh’s significant contributions to al-Nahda movement, or the Arab Renaissance, while also revisiting and challenging the narrative of madness associated with Ziadeh’s name. I do so through looking at Ziadeh's newly discovered manuscript, the Nights of Isis Copia, which she wrote during her stay at the mental asylum in Lebanon, Asfuriyyah. I read this manuscript as a literary text that invites us today to revisit and question Nahdah as an often glorified and celebrated movement, opening the possibility for reading marginal(ized) texts that can offer new trajectories of its history. My synthesis of Ziadeh's manuscript as a counter-narrative of the Nahḍa movement is a first in the field, it derives from the practice of close reading and responds to Scott Deuachar and El Ariss’s call for possibilities of new approaches to understanding the Nahḍa period and its intellectuals. The notion of unstable models finds resonance in Ziadeh’s manuscript on many levels, to mention but a few: the nature of the manuscript, its genre(s), location and time of its writing in 1940s which is very different from that of its finding and publishing in 2017, as well as the judgement of the mental and social status of its writer. Altogether, this approach brings me back to my main research question also highlighted in my presentation’s title: Rereading Nahdah through Marginalized Narratives.