Maria Messina was born in Palermo on March 14, 1887, to a schoolteacher and a young woman from the petty nobility. The hastily arranged marriage of her parents was troubled from the outset due to marked differences in their ages and social backgrounds. Messina’s aristocratic mother, only sixteen at the time of her marriage, was ill prepared for the responsibilities of domestic life, while her father, embittered at having to abandon his studies, remained a distant figure to his family for many years (A. Messina 1988, 12). Tensions between Messina’s parents would subside as the family’s economic situation improved, but their two children suffered from the marital disharmony. The close rapport Messina shared with her elder brother Salvatore, to whom she dedicated her first work, was most likely forged at this difficult time in their lives (Garra Agosta 1979, 28; 33).

In 1903 Messina’s father was promoted to scholastic inspector, and the family relocated to Mistretta, a picturesque town sixty miles from Sicily’s capital city of Palermo. While Messina nurtured a deep affection for i buoni Mistrettesi (the good people of Mistretta), she was deeply conflicted about provincial life as a whole. Coming of age in a milieu that offered young women few opportunities for social interaction was a particularly lonely experience for the sheltered adolescent (Messina 1919, 158).1 According to her niece, Messina turned to writing as an escape not only from familial discord but also the excruciating tedium of small-town life.

In those days in Sicily, the male child could escape suffocating provincial life if he wanted. He could study, go out with his friends and sow his wild oats, then there was the university, and finally a career and independence. But for a young girl, condemned to embroidery and piano lessons, there was no other hope than that of a marriage arranged by relatives, or if she was lucky, one that blossomed at family reunions and parties that were strictly monitored by her parents. In that joyless house, where all economic difficulties had to be decorously concealed, even this was lacking. (A. Messina 1988, 12)2

No record exists of the years Messina spent in Mistretta or of the events that led to the publication of her first collection of stories in 1909 by the Palermo editor, Remo Sandron. What we do know is that Messina took the extraordinary step of sending the volume, Pettini-fini e altre novelle (Fine Combs and Other Short Stories) to Giovanni Verga, the aging master of Italian verismo. Although Verga and Messina were both Sicilians who saw in their island’s impoverished peasant world a subject worthy of literary attention, Messina’s bold move was not without risk. Verga was a towering figure on the literary landscape, a taciturn individual protective of his privacy and reputedly dismissive of women writers.3 Verga’s favorable response to the work was extraordinary recognition for the novice and marked the beginning of a correspondence that would last ten years, until shortly before Verga’s death in 1922. In her reply to Italy’s most esteemed man of letters, an astonished Messina wrote: