Neither Camilla, who “breathes more freely,” nor Bettina, anxious to give meaning to her youth, changes her fate—none of them do. And yet in their destinies, there is always a ray of sunshine because each one of these girls, whom pleasure has not deluded with a false laugh or painted lips, believes in “something” and desires to help someone.

And she who believes in the usefulness of her work or in the words of the one who loves her, she who longs for a happiness lost to her because of her own missteps, or who remembers a precious little life that is no more, each one occasionally steps out of that circle of life to enter, alone and unseen, that small, spiritual sanctuary where her convictions and noblest aspirations of femininity remain fresh and untouched. (Messina 1997b)

Messina penned the “Congedo” in 1921 at a moment when her future was uncertain (1997b). Deteriorating health had hampered her ability to write, and frustration regarding the mysterious nature of her illness compounded her dejection during this period. In spite of these obstacles, Messina countered bouts of debilitating inactivity with periods of extraordinary productivity. Between 1920 and 1921 alone, she published three collections of short stories, Il guinzaglio (The Leash), Ragazze siciliane (Sicilian Girls), and Personcine (Little People) as well as three novels, including her most highly acclaimed work, La casa nel vicolo (The House in the Shadows), a novel set in Sicily. Eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Messina published her last novel in 1928 and retired to the Tuscan countryside outside Pistoia where she died from complications of the disease in 1944.

At the time of her death at age fifty-six, Messina had faded from the literary scene, forgotten by editors, critics, and the reading public (Pausini 2001, 183–94).11 Her name appears nowhere in twentieth-century Italian literary histories, and she remained virtually unknown to the modern literary establishment until the 1979 discovery of her letters to Verga by Giovanni Garra Agosta. Sciascia’s subsequent recovery of Messina’s writings prompted the republication of three short stories that appeared in 1981 under the title Casa paterna. In his brief commentary that accompanies the stories, Sciascia reproached the feminists of his day, questioning how it was possible, in an era “dedicated to the recovery of feminine texts,” that scholars had overlooked Messina’s work. In fact, Messina’s name is conspicuously absent from Giuliana Morandi’s La voce che è in lei (The Voice Within Her [1980]) one of the seminal studies on lesser-known women’s writing in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italy. At Sciascia’s urging, the Palermo publishing house of Elvira Sellerio began reissuing Messina’s short-story collections and novels in the 1980s, an effort that continues to this day.12 Many of the author’s numerous works for children, however, remain out of print and a republication of Messina’s complete opus has yet to appear.