5. Messina’s response to Verga in a letter of 1911 testifies that Verga offered rare words of support to his young protégé: “You have made me weep out of tenderness and gratitude. I am young, oh my teacher, young and timid and your praise fills me with humility. I ask myself, “What have I ever written that merits praise like that from Giovanni Verga? Am I worthy?” (Garra Agosta 1979, 33).

6. Verga’s Mena Malavoglia is the proverbial nineteenth-century “domestic angel” who suffers in silence at her loom (Verga 1973, 67), while La Lupa, with her insatiable sexual desire, wreaks destruction on Christian men (1974, 145).

7. In her autobiographical novel Cosima (published in English under the same name), Deledda recalls how her first story, published in a women’s magazine, sparked outrage in her small town of Nuoro. Reaction on the part of her spinster aunts “who did not know how to read and who burned those sheets with pictures of sinners and evil women” was equally vehement (Deledda 1975, 63). Messina alludes to a similar reality in a number of her fictions, suggesting that her literary ambitions were met with equally harsh criticism: “I was used to my father shouting every time he saw me with a piece of paper, and to my mother always telling me that a girl should cut off her hands before she even thinks about writing down her thoughts” (“Il pozzo e il professore,” in Messina 1997c).

8. Joseph Farrell discusses precisely this relationship between Sicily and Sicilian writers within the context of Sciascia’s own writing (Farrell 1995, 32–47).

9. The second story entitled “La Mèrica” was published as part of the collection Le briciole del destino in 1918. However, Messina confirms that she had completed the volume by 1913—just two years after the publication of Piccoli gorghi (Garra Agosta 1979, 43)—making the work chronologically closer to her other emigration stories as well as to her own emigrant experience.

10. Some of the most notable contributions to the genre in this early period are those of Sicilian writers. See Luigi Pirandello’s “L’altro figlio” (“The Other Son” [1905]) and Luigi Capuana’s lesser-known Gli americani di Ràbbato (The Americans from Ràbbato [1909]).

11. Messina’s last letters, written to the Florentine editor Enrico Bemporard between 1917 and 1926, attest to the author’s failing health, financial concerns, and final editorial struggles. The letters were recently published for the first time in Cristina Pausini’s Le “briciole” della letteratura: Le novelle e i romanzi di Maria Messina (2001).

12. In the late 1990s, Roswitha Schoell-Dombrowski collected five of Messina’s previously unpublished short stories. Sellerio published the volume in 1998 under the title Dopo l’inverno (After the Winter).

Works Cited

Alba, Richard. 1985. Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Baldini, Antonio. 1918. Review of Le briciole del destino, in “Rassegna italiana,” 15 July.

Barbarulli, Clotilde, and Luciana Brandi. 1996. I colori del silenzio: Strategie narrative e linguistiche in Maria Messina. Ferrara: Luciana Tufani Editrice.