I remain convinced that in the future, in the far off future, women will be what men are now. But by then men will have completely changed too, and the distance between them will still be the same as it is today. Then men will leave women the business of writing novels, lyrics, tragedies, comedies, and if they feel like it, poems. However, I must add that they will never succeed in creating anything new because by then, there will be nothing new to create in artistic forms. It will be an eternal repetition until they tire of it, something that is rather improbable. Women are obstinate. (Capuana 1907, 21–22)

4. A nascent feminist movement in the decades following national unification in 1861 brought longstanding women’s issues to the forefront of Italian politics. Women’s growing presence in the factories of the industrialized North raised awareness about universal suffrage, the inequality of Italy’s Civil Code, and the need to regulate working conditions. Activists Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920) and Russian-born Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925) were two of the most instrumental figures in the early years of the battle regarding la questione femminile. The debate did not enter its most critical phase, however, until the turn of the century (Odorisio 1986).

5. Messina’s response to Verga in a letter of 1911 testifies that Verga offered rare words of support to his young protégé: “You have made me weep out of tenderness and gratitude. I am young, oh my teacher, young and timid and your praise fills me with humility. I ask myself, “What have I ever written that merits praise like that from Giovanni Verga? Am I worthy?” (Garra Agosta 1979, 33).

6. Verga’s Mena Malavoglia is the proverbial nineteenth-century “domestic angel” who suffers in silence at her loom (Verga 1973, 67), while La Lupa, with her insatiable sexual desire, wreaks destruction on Christian men (1974, 145).

7. In her autobiographical novel Cosima (published in English under the same name), Deledda recalls how her first story, published in a women’s magazine, sparked outrage in her small town of Nuoro. Reaction on the part of her spinster aunts “who did not know how to read and who burned those sheets with pictures of sinners and evil women” was equally vehement (Deledda 1975, 63). Messina alludes to a similar reality in a number of her fictions, suggesting that her literary ambitions were met with equally harsh criticism: “I was used to my father shouting every time he saw me with a piece of paper, and to my mother always telling me that a girl should cut off her hands before she even thinks about writing down her thoughts” (“Il pozzo e il professore,” in Messina 1997c).

8. Joseph Farrell discusses precisely this relationship between Sicily and Sicilian writers within the context of Sciascia’s own writing (Farrell 1995, 32–47).