In narrating socio-political changes in Egypt between 1919 and 1957 Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1956-57) chronicles the effects of these developments on the life of the Abd al-Jawad family over three generations. Whether it is the notorious family patriarch, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, and his son, Fahmy, in Palace Walk; or his youngest son, Kamal, in Palace of Desire; or his grandsons in Sugar Street, the focus is male characters’ coming of age in an Egypt struggling under British occupation. This paper traces a female journey on the margins of the last volume, Sugar Street (1957). I argue that through erasures in the narrative, readers can piece together a female subtext, which the novel neither centers nor overtly acknowledges, but one that tells of the intellectual and political formation of a modern educated Egyptian working-class woman in 1930s and 1940s Egypt. On the seams of this male-authored, male-centric text, is the story of female growth and development – a female Bildungsroman, of journalist Sawsan Hammad. As an editor of a journal, Sawsan evaluates pieces that amateur journalists such as Ahmad, the grandson of Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, send for publication. She believes in a world where all efforts are mobilized towards curing the nation’s ills; a world where art is functional, and the artist involved. Although it is Ahmad who emerges as a representative of the post-1919 Revolution national intellectual at the conclusion of Sugar Street, his education is unthinkable without Sawsan, who is instrumental in his training and eventual maturation as an independent thinker. Ahmad’s apprenticeship mirrors that of Sawsan who guides him through the process using a dialectical method supplemented by philosophical readings. A counterpoint to the women in his family, she represents the new generation of actively engaged women who demand a place in political life, and for whom domesticity is not the ultimate goal. In a reversal of the traditional female story, it is Ahmad who is rewarded with marriage to Sawsan once he becomes her intellectual equal. After marriage, Sawsan remains her husband’s tutor as, for example, when she heads to work the day following their marriage, or as she continues to fight for workers’ rights, unperturbed by his imprisonment.