Unmarried Women: Stories

Unmarried Women: Stories

Role

Author: Matilde Serao

Translator: Paula Paige

Contributing author: Mary Ann McDonald Carolan

Description/Summary

Mary Ann McDonald Carolan is a contributing author, "Foreward."

BOOK DESCRIPTION: Matilde Serao is widely regarded as the most successful Italian woman journalist of the nineteenth century as well as being an important writer of fiction. A great observer of life, Serao focused her writing directly on the most pressing problems of a newly unified Italy, urban poverty, and the North/South divide. Historian and critic Benedetto Croce said of her that she had an "imagination that is limpid and alive"; Nobel Laureate Giosue Carducci called her the greatest woman writer in Italy; and Gabriele D'Annunzio dedicated a novel to her. She was apparently on the short list for the Nobel Prize in 1926, which ultimately went to the Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda.

This collection, the first to make Serao's short stories available in English translation, reflects this naturalistic writer's interest in the everyday drama of the lives of women in the Italy of her day. In Serao's spare and simple prose, the young women of turn-of-the-century Naples come to life, negotiating the details of school and work, church and marriage, in a world circumscribed by fathers and chaperones, fiances and bosses. Infused with the writer's deep sense of humanity, their quietly involving stories--at once so poetic and so ordinary--attest to the transformative power of literature, and to the promise that even the most humble life holds.

ISBN

9780810124042

Publication Date

2007

Publication Information

Carolan, Mary Ann McDonald. Foreword. Unmarried Women: Stories, by Matilde Serao. Translated by Paula Paige, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2007, vii-xv.

Comments

Copyright 2007 Northwestern University Press

Unmarried Women: Stories

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