Deledda wrote of a society which had hardly changed from that which the Romans found when they colonized the island. The conquering armies of the Vandals, Lombards, Arabs, Pisans, Genoese, Catalans, Spaniards and Italians had little impact on the isolated hill villages. They would occupy the coasts and leave the inland untouched. It is only the latter part of the twentieth century with its new roads, modern communications and above all the television that has started to change the remote villages of Sardinia. But like the Christianity of its conquerors, the change is often more apparent than real with the traditions and customs of two thousand years stubbornly resisting change. It is this world locked in a never changing past which is the subject matter of nearly all Grazia Deledda’s fiction, and that gives a fascination and a richness of texture which makes her writing unique.

Grazia Deledda was born in Nuoro in 1871, a hill top town not far from the North East coast. Her education consisted in going to the local primary school, and in voracious reading in her teens of the novels and poetry of the romantics. She was only fifteen when her first short story was published in a local paper. A succession of short stories and her first novel, were published in newspapers and magazines before she was twenty. In her twenties the influence of the romantics gave way to that of Verga and verism. What Verga achieved for the fishermen and peasants of Sicily, Deledda began to do for the shepherds of Sardinia. Her work started to be known outside Sardinia and attract critical acclaim, especially from Luigi Capuana.

In 1899, she left Nuoro for the first time, and settled in Cagliari, the island’s capital, where she met Palmiro Madesani, a civil servant. They were married the next year and transferred to Rome. It is now that Grazia Deledda found her voice as a novelist. Living away from Sardinia, she recreated it in her fiction for an evergrowing public. From Elias Portolu published in 1903 we are reading the work of a mature artist which culminates with the publication of La Madre in 1920, and the international acclaim of the Nobel Prize in 1927.

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La Madre is a study of three taciturn individuals in an isolated and primitive society. Passion is put into the scales with social conformity and is outweighed. The instinctive desire of the young to love, even when it is not allowed, in the world of the 1980’s would carry all before it. The priest would renounce his vocation, the young woman her social position and the mother accept the unacceptable, thinking of the grandchildren which would come. Of the three people concerned, it is the mother whose arguments triumphed, as she offers the easiest path; the acceptance of the social order and the subjugation of passion and individuality to duty. There is no clear decision; no assertion of will, more the fear of the result of confronting the situation that their emotions have created for them.