Messina penned the “Congedo” in 1921 at a moment when her future was uncertain (1997b). Deteriorating health had hampered her ability to write, and frustration regarding the mysterious nature of her illness compounded her dejection during this period. In spite of these obstacles, Messina countered bouts of debilitating inactivity with periods of extraordinary productivity. Between 1920 and 1921 alone, she published three collections of short stories, Il guinzaglio (The Leash), Ragazze siciliane (Sicilian Girls), and Personcine (Little People) as well as three novels, including her most highly acclaimed work, La casa nel vicolo (The House in the Shadows), a novel set in Sicily. Eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Messina published her last novel in 1928 and retired to the Tuscan countryside outside Pistoia where she died from complications of the disease in 1944.

At the time of her death at age fifty-six, Messina had faded from the literary scene, forgotten by editors, critics, and the reading public (Pausini 2001, 183–94).11 Her name appears nowhere in twentieth-century Italian literary histories, and she remained virtually unknown to the modern literary establishment until the 1979 discovery of her letters to Verga by Giovanni Garra Agosta. Sciascia’s subsequent recovery of Messina’s writings prompted the republication of three short stories that appeared in 1981 under the title Casa paterna. In his brief commentary that accompanies the stories, Sciascia reproached the feminists of his day, questioning how it was possible, in an era “dedicated to the recovery of feminine texts,” that scholars had overlooked Messina’s work. In fact, Messina’s name is conspicuously absent from Giuliana Morandi’s La voce che è in lei (The Voice Within Her [1980]) one of the seminal studies on lesser-known women’s writing in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italy. At Sciascia’s urging, the Palermo publishing house of Elvira Sellerio began reissuing Messina’s short-story collections and novels in the 1980s, an effort that continues to this day.12 Many of the author’s numerous works for children, however, remain out of print and a republication of Messina’s complete opus has yet to appear.

Recent scholarship has done much to rescue Messina from literary obscurity, recognizing in her powerful, understated narratives one of the most original voices in early-twentieth-century Italy. The substantial bibliography on the author (Pausini 2001, 169–76), as well as ongoing critical studies by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, will most certainly ensure Messina a long-denied but well-deserved place in the Italian canon. Messina’s works have been translated into French, Spanish, and German, yet only one novel, La casa nel vicolo (The House in the Shadows), is available in English. This current translation of a small number of her works is a modest beginning and one that will hopefully spur further interest in a writer truly worthy of international recognition.

Notes

All translations from the Italian are my own unless otherwise noted.