When I sent you my first book, I had hoped that you would read it, but never did I dare to dream for your opinion on the work. I started out with so much hesitation, and so alone that I feared my poor peasants—studied at length and with so much love, put forth in a “book” and set free to go their own way—would be judged poorly, maybe even barely noticed, and not at all understood in the way I had intended. (Garra Agosta 1979, 27)

Messina’s apprehension was understandable. Just twenty-two years old, she was an unknown female attempting to break into the established ranks of her famous compatriots who had long since made their mark on Italian verismo. Verga, along with Luigi Capuana, Luigi Pirandello, and Federico De Roberto, were respected authors and university-educated men from affluent families who moved comfortably within the literary circles of Milan, Rome, and Florence. Conversely, Messina was a young woman without formal education who had mastered Italian only through assiduous self-study. While a lack of institutional schooling was not unusual for Italian women writers of the period (and here one thinks primarily of Nobel Prize laureate Sardinian Grazia Deledda) it was nonetheless a formidable obstacle for women like Messina who aspired to literary careers.

Messina’s geographic isolation cannot be underestimated, especially when measured against the more worldly experiences of her elder female contemporaries living and writing on the Italian continent. Matilda Serao in urban Naples, Ada Negri in the rural provinces of the North, and even Grazia Deledda, who had left Sardinia for Rome in 1900, all witnessed the rapid expansion of an entrepreneurial middle class and burgeoning proletarian movements in which Italian women had become visible members.4 Sicily, by contrast, was a region still lacking the basic infrastructures of a modernized society, an insular world dominated by conservative ideologies and removed from the Italian mainstream. Italian women may have lagged far behind their European counterparts in matters of social and political autonomy at the turn of the century, but for Sicilian women, the situation was magnified to an extreme. In her introductory letter to Verga, Messina speaks—in unusually candid terms for a Sicilian woman of her station and upbringing—of the overwhelming isolation and resulting solitude that defined her formative years:

I have always lived alone with just my close family; I have never even attended school. My teachers were my mother, when I was little, and then my only and beloved brother, until just a few years ago…. Yes, I have grown up alone. And yet I have never really felt the need for others, having always been rather uncultivated and removed from life. Still, I have never ceased to observe life. (28)

This awareness of her position at the geographic, intellectual, and cultural margins of a larger Italian society explains in part Messina’s deep feeling of kinship with Verga, not only as an artist she revered, but also as an individual with whom she shared a profound sense of sicilianità (43).