9. The second story entitled “La Mèrica” was published as part of the collection Le briciole del destino in 1918. However, Messina confirms that she had completed the volume by 1913—just two years after the publication of Piccoli gorghi (Garra Agosta 1979, 43)—making the work chronologically closer to her other emigration stories as well as to her own emigrant experience.

10. Some of the most notable contributions to the genre in this early period are those of Sicilian writers. See Luigi Pirandello’s “L’altro figlio” (“The Other Son” [1905]) and Luigi Capuana’s lesser-known Gli americani di Ràbbato (The Americans from Ràbbato [1909]).

11. Messina’s last letters, written to the Florentine editor Enrico Bemporard between 1917 and 1926, attest to the author’s failing health, financial concerns, and final editorial struggles. The letters were recently published for the first time in Cristina Pausini’s Le “briciole” della letteratura: Le novelle e i romanzi di Maria Messina (2001).

12. In the late 1990s, Roswitha Schoell-Dombrowski collected five of Messina’s previously unpublished short stories. Sellerio published the volume in 1998 under the title Dopo l’inverno (After the Winter).

Works Cited

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Barbarulli, Clotilde, and Luciana Brandi. 1996. I colori del silenzio: Strategie narrative e linguistiche in Maria Messina. Ferrara: Luciana Tufani Editrice.

Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio. 1923. “Una scolara di Verga.” In La vita e il libro, 1913. Reprint, vol. 3, Bologna: Zanichelli.

Capuana, Luigi. 1907. “Letteratura femminile.” Nuova Antologia, 1 January.

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Di Giovanna, Maria. 1989. La fuga impossibile. Sulla narrativa di Maria Messina. Naples: Federico and Ardia.

Farrell, Joseph. 1995. “De Rebus Siculus.” Leonardo Sciascia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Franzina, Emilio. 1996. Dall’Arcadia in America: Attività letteraria ed emigrazione transoceanica in Italia (1850–1940). Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli.

Garra Agosta, Giovanni. 1979. Un idillio letterario inedito verghiano: Lettere inedite di Maria Messina a Giovanni Verga. Catania: Greco.

Harney, Robert. 1978. “Men Without Women: Italian Migrants in Canada, 1885–1930.” In The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America. Ed. by Betty Caroli, Robert Harney, and Lydio Tomasi. Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Toronto.

Kroha, Lucienne. 1992. The Woman Writer in Late Nineteenth Century Italy. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.

Magistro, Elise. 1996. “Narrative Voice and the Regional Experience: Redefining Female Images in the Works of Maria Messina.” In Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present. Edited by Maria Ornella Marotti. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 111–28.

Marazzi, Martino. 2004. Voices of Italian America. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Madison: Farleigh Dickenson University Press.

Messina, Annie. 1988. Introduction to Piccoli gorghi, by Maria Messina. Palermo: Sellerio, 9–15.

———. 1998. “Un ricordo di Annie Messina.” “Intervista di Salvatore Intelisano. “L’istrice.”