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).