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:

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.