In a thank-you letter of 1920 to Sardinian artist Mario Mossa De Murtas, who had presented the already renowned writer with one of his paintings portraying a procession of the different traditional trades of their native island, Grazia Deledda wrote:

In questa casa tanto lontana dal chiasso e dalla confusione di Roma più che se io non fossi rimasta nella mia lontana casa in Sardegna, vivo tutta dedita alle tanto disprezzate faccende domestiche, curandomi di mio marito e dei miei figli nelle ore non consacrate al lavoro. Perché ho il mio orario di lavoro che osservo. Non mi affido agli...

This chapter is devoted to an in-depth-analysis ofLa via del male[The Path of Evil(1896, 1906, 1916)], a novel often defined by critics a ‘spartiacque’ [watershed (Turchi 1994: 9; Dolfi 1984: 10; Capuana 1973 [1898]: 97)] between Deledda’s early writings, imbued with late Romanticism and provincial feuilleton heroes, and the mature productions, acclaimed for the intense folkloric atmosphere and the deeply moral conflicts of their characters. However, a close reading of the text will highlight its significance not as a divide but as a bridge between Romanticism, Verism, and modernity in Deledda’s literary journey.

The focus of our...

In the present chapter I argue that the novelCenere[Ashes(1903, 1904, 1910)] represents a transgressive rewriting of the novel of formation in the spirit of modernity. The boundary-breaking significance of writing in itself, on which Deledda would elaborate in the posthumous autobiographical novelCosima(Migiel 1994: 113), is enhanced through the intertextual texture ofCenere. For the first time, after exploring the theoretical issues of positivistic determinism in her early prose, and particularly inLa via del male, Deledda instils Nietzsche’s subversive thought in her narrative.

Moreover, the fact that this novel generated a creative synergy between the...

Il segreto dell’uomo solitario(1921) belongs to Deledda’s late works, such asLa danza della collana(1924) orAnnalena Bilsini(1927), dislocated in the symbolism of psychological landscapes that have left the Sardinian topography behind. Paradoxically, while Deledda’s major novels have often been targeted for their restricted and folkloric identity, her less Sardinian novels have been criticized for the opposite reason, as duller expressions of the archaic culture that nurtured Deledda’s narrative (Sapegno 1971).

My analysis ofIl segreto dell’uomo solitariointends to point out one of the possible reasons for this shift in critical appreciation. This reason, I argue,...

In a letter of 20 May 1923 to young writer Marino Moretti, Grazia Deledda, already internationally known and soon to be awarded the Nobel Prize, dwells on the silent pleasure of the ‘solitudine volontaria’ [voluntary solitude] that she enjoys in her sheltered Roman backyard. There, she savours the ‘felicità vegetale’ [vegetable happiness] of her assiduous creative work, in which her ‘pensieri sono fili di strane erbe che si muovono al vento, i palpiti del cuore le foglie della robinia che si staccano ad una ad una dal ramo’ [thoughts are strange blades of grass moving in the wind, while heartbeats...