In this chapter, I analyse the construction of voice and form deployed in a variety of Urdu texts about women at the turn of the century. In particular, I examine the social contexts, linguistic registers and literary form of the Urdu novel to assess the kind of middle-class values that were normalized at the time. Form is a necessary consideration when it comes to late nineteenth-century representations of gender, as both fiction and prescriptive texts played an influential role in depictions of sharif Muslim women as heroines at a time of reform and changing reading publics. I explore the centrality of women's moral and ethical behaviour, sharafat, in selected texts, elucidating the colonial project of women's education and reform of the zenana mediated by the modernizing forces of two schools of thought, Aligarh and Deoband. The reformists set out a narrow vision of gender in cultural narratives enshrining the heteronormative Muslim family as an ideal nation. This is something that has been explored in detail by historians and literary scholars looking at this period. However, what is sometimes overlooked is the hybridity of voice in these forms. Given Urdu's links to an Islamicate and Indic heritage, it is relevant to note Maria Rosa Menocal's observations about Islamicate cultural narratives in medieval Spain and how they influenced new European languages in the twelfth century. Urdu is a hybrid language that developed as a spoken lingua franca in the subcontinent with a Perso-Arabic vocabulary and an Indo-Aryan linguistic background. It has been variously known as the Persian rekhta (mixed), Turkish Urdu (camp) and Indo-Aryan Hindi. As a literary language, the classical canon was established in the Deccan, a centre of Dravidian languages, which came under the influence of Muslim dynasties in Golconda and Bijapur. Dakani Urdu incorporated the local idiom in its poetic diction and rekhti is attached to this organic relationship. Delhi and Lucknow as the centres of literary Urdu became synonymous with the writings of the poets Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda and Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. Experimentations with form in the nineteenth century were part of the shifting dynamics of language and power and the standardization of Urdu as a modern language.