Older Italian edition, first published 1950, translation appeared 1979)
Recent English language edition, photographed with type of book heroine writes in, translator Ann Goldstein, Italian text first published 1952, translated 2023)
Dear Friends and readers,
These are not only two of the finest books by women I’ve read this year; they are both part of an Italian tradition of feminism whose latest extraordinary flowering is found in Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter (La Figlia Oscura, pub 2006, translated 2008, Ann Goldstein) and Neapolitan Quartet (L’Amica Geniale, 2012-2015). A few of Natalia Ginzburg’s novellas are written in this tradition: they are subjective narratives with a woman at the center who is enduring an ordeal-filled life where she is struggling to find and build her most fulfilling identity.
Although written 20 years later than de Cespedes’s novel, Aleramo’s A Woman feels like it should be discussed first, because it is the first book to bring out into the discussably open the intimate realities, feminist aspirations, and real life experiences of a woman and make them the center of the book. Nothing like this in language, nothing with this kind of content, had ever been printed before. It might be summed up with the equivalent title in English feminized: The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Like Joyce’s book, it is mostly autobiographical (hence the absence of names), and the trajectory is of this of specific-culture drenched obstacles, which in this case are the demands a woman do, and get in the way of her fulfilling her genius for writing. As a woman and in Italy, these obstacles are distinctly different from Joyce’s. Almost no one in the text is named.
As a middle class girl, she is not sent to school beyond the most elementary education; when she is 15, her parents think it is time for her to marry and among her suitors, is one who is more violent and nervy than most of the others; he rapes her, and she thinks (and her parents agree) this means she must marry him. The novel occurs over a 10 year period where she endures being shut up in a bedroom during the day because he is too jealous to let her go anywhere, sex when she doesn’t want it, beatings. She has one son who gives her what joy and meaning she knows. Gradually over a course of time, she and her husband move from Milan to a rural area further south, where her father provides him with a fine-paying job as a factory head (the workers receive derisory wages), and in this town she manages to build a frustrating socializing life. She meets no equal in intelligence or cultural aspiration. She falls in love, is found out, is ostracized horribly, enclosed again. This time she teaches herself to write and reads incessantly, begins to publish (the family has connections) and when her husband loses his job, they move to Rome. She finds friends but is again stymied by this husband who she feels she is bound to all her life, but whom her life enables her to break away from — with help from her family. During the novel she sees her mother end up in an asylum because of treatment parallel to what she’s endured; sisters’ leading thwarted lives, friends too; the men in the novel are often equally twisted. Finally at the end (very like Nora in Ibsen’s play, The Doll’s House, which is alluded to in the novel), she breaks away at great emotional cost, having to leave her beloved son behind. By law she loses a legacy she had inherited, and all that she had owned. But as the last page is reached, she is free, if with a hard road ahead of her.
1913 photograph of Aleramo
My edition (University of California Press, 1983, ISBN 0-520-04949-7, same translator as the older edition) has a superb introduction by Richard Drake where he tells of Aleramo’s life (1876-1960) whose opening phase is told in this autofiction memoir. Aleramo is a pseudonym; her legal name was Rina Pierangeli Faccio. The later phase reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg: Aleramo was politically active, but on behalf of women (suffrage), feminist causes, and the homeless; she was involved with the fascists, the communists and fashionable art movements. She wrote as much journalism as she did fiction. She was for at time the editor of a Milanese feminist journal, L’Italia Femminile. I felt her book really took place in Milan, though Turin as well as Rome were cited. She also differs from Ginzburg because she had a number of lovers, wrote a diary about one affair. Alas, she never wrote another book as daring or relentlessly original as this one. Ginzburg slowly developed into a feminist; Aleramo was there in the first place but her later books and her writing had to backtrack or move into side issues to be published. Her readership and world did not want her to go further than she had. But it was enough and influenced women writers in Italy afterwards. It was one of the books published and pushed during the 1970s phase of feminism in the US and UK, and calls out for attention as an utterly “authentic, controlled and sustained” passionate polemic. I found it mesmerizing, unputdownable.
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I admit that all too often I find book club discussions disappointing; more often they can be frustrating because the level of talk is banal, conventional-conservative, the people unwilling to risk saying what they felt (if they felt something) truly, especially if it relates to private truths about their lives. What made de Cespedes’ so remarkable to me was it prompted several women in on OLLI at Mason book club (in Reston, online via zoom) to spill their “guts” out — their real frustrations, disappointments, troubles as women either married, with children, trying to start a career, at their jobs. A book that can do that must have something in it prompting authentic burning responses. Yet it is a far less daring book than Aleramo’s.
Published in NYC by Astra House, with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, it has received a lot of attention from reviewers and summaries of the story can be found readily (see the New York Times Book Review; the Washington Post’s BookWorld; Kirkus). I will tell it little differently:
There are four stories told in this notebook that Valeria Cossati buys and keeps hidden away: that of her husband, who like her during the course of the entries seems to have a liaison with someone else, in his case a publisher-TV person who is considering his script for a screenplay, a deal that ultimately seems to fall through. There is her daughter, who becomes involved with a married man and much to her horror is planning to go off to live with him (of course without marrying him as he is already married). She has a son, who is having a very hard time starting a career, one where it seems he must travel abroad (to both parents’ dismay); he becomes involved with an inferior (in gifts, intellect and perhaps class) girl and gets her pregnant. When the book closes this girl is pregnant and Valeria, our heroine, the center of this multi-plot book about to quit her job and stay home and take care of her grandchild! The opposite of what happens in Una Donna happens her: the book begins with Valeria working and getting a real salary for herself and family, being promoted, daring to explore her psyche, her desires, her real thoughts about all those around her and herself. She is continually wrenched emotionally by her relationships with her children (far more than her husband). She remembers intense tussles with her mother whom she still visits. I think we are to understand that she too has an affair, hers with her boss whom she works for on Sundays (the two of them alone together in the office); the pair of people consider going off together for a holiday but never do this, and by the end of the book Valeria is closing herself off from opportunities for herself to grow, see the world, use this talent for writing she is deeply awakened by.
Mondadori photograph
Perhaps because the heroine is thwarted, because she is deeply conflicted over the new contemporary values and the older traditional ones this book club group responded so frankly — and for themselves, or us (since I was there) usefully. Cespedes herself was no homebody. She also was a journalist, and politically active, more dangerously than Aleramo: Cespedes was jailed for anti-fascist activities during WW2, imprisoned for a time, two of her novels banned; she wrote a screenplay for a best-selling movie. She was married to man in the foreign service (as wikipedia puts it), and stayed with him until his death. In her later years she lived in Paris. Like Una Donna, I found the Forbidden Notebook, if not mesmerizing, unputdownable, and so did several women in my book club. Other of her novels are said to pick up the same themes and treat them in the same conflicted ways.
Like Aleramo, Cespedes has not received the kind of attention and lacks the name recognition of women writers in French, English or German of her calibre and interest. Both of them suffer from the real anti-feminism and suppression of women’s causes and norms as central to the arts until very recently. It should be noted that Ferrante uses a pseudonym (as did Lucia Lopresi as Anna Banti in her marvelous part historical fiction, part autobiography, Artemisa, about the great Renaissance painter who went to court because she was raped).See my blog on Banti and her brilliant book.
The style of both books is plain, lucid, subtle and flexible. I’d say that de Cespedes uses more metaphoric language, more allusion to literary works but that Aleramo’s deep structures are themselves the product of reading much women’s poetry — there was a lot once upon a time in Italy, and letters and journalistic writing going back to the Renaissance.
Fellow readers, you can do no better in fiction or semi-fictional narrative, especially if you are a woman or want to experience a great woman’s book, than read these. I use this qualification for my next book will be on a third extraordinary book you must not miss, the non-fiction narrative by John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale, a story of rape, class, gender and riot in later 18th century New York City.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 