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Contents (17)
  1. La Madre (The Woman and the Priest)
  2. CHAPTER ONE
  3. CHAPTER TWO
  4. CHAPTER THREE
  5. CHAPTER FOUR
  6. CHAPTER FIVE
  7. CHAPTER SIX
  8. CHAPTER SEVEN
  9. CHAPTER EIGHT
  10. CHAPTER NINE
  11. CHAPTER TEN
  12. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  13. CHAPTER TWELVE
  14. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  15. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  16. CHRONOLOGY
  17. AFTERWORD

And he knew instantly that she had died of the shock of that same grief, that same terror which he had been enabled to overcome.

And he, too, clenched his teeth that he might not cry aloud when he raised his head; and across the confused mass of the people surging round, his eyes met the eyes of Agnes fixed upon him.

CHRONOLOGY

1871 Born in Nuoro, Sardinia. (The street where she was born is now called via Grazia Deledda.)
1882 Finished her formal education at 11, after primary school.
1886 Published her first short story when she was 15.
1888 Becomes a regular contributor of short stories to the magazine, Ultima Moda.
1890 Her first novel, STELLA D’ORIENTE, published in a Sardinian newspaper.
1894 RACCONTI SARDI, published.
1896 Publication of VIA DEL MALE, brings her work notice outside of Sardinia and critical praise, especially from the verist critic, Luigi Capuana.
1897 Publication of TESORO.
1899 Leaves Nuoro for the first time and settles in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia. Meets the civil servant, Palmiro Madesani.
1900 Marries Palmiro Madesani and moves with him to Rome. Publication of IL VECCHIO DELLA MONTAGNA.
1903–20 She produces her best work and establishes an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period is set in Sardinia.
1903 Publication of ELIAS PORTOLU. (Considered to be with LA MADRA, Grazia Deledda’s best novel.)
1904 Publication of CENERE (translated in 1908 as ASHES) and L’EDERA.
1913–15 Publication of CANNE AL VENTO and MARIANNA SIRCA
1914–18 World War I.
1920 Publication of LA MADRE.
1921 Publication of IL SEGRETO DELL’UOMO SOLITARIO. This novel marks a new stage in her writing with the abandonment of the Sardinian background. Her best work has been written, and although she continues to publish novels and short stories they are not of the same literary quality.
1922 LA MADRE translated into English as THE WOMAN AND THE PRIEST. Reprinted in 1926 and 1928 with the D.H. Lawrence introduction.
1927 Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1936 Death of Grazia Deledda. She is buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.
1937 Posthumous publication of COSIMA, a short autobiographical work.
1979 A new translation of ELIAS PORTOLU, Published by Quartet Books.
1987 Dedalus’s edition of LA MADRE (THE WOMAN AND THE PRIEST).

We include as an Afterword the D.H. Lawrence
Introduction to the 1926 and 1928 editions as it gives a
contemporary view of Grazia Deledda.

AFTERWORD

Grazia Deledda is already one of the elder living writers of Italy, and though her work does not take on quite so rapidly as the novels of Fogazzaro, or even D’Annunzio, that peculiarly obscuring nebulousness of the past-which-is-only-just-gone-by, still, the dimness has touched it. It is curious that fifteen or twenty years ago should seem so much more remote than fifty or eighty years ago. But perhaps it is organically necessary to us that our feelings should die, temporarily, toward that strange intermediate period which lies between present actuality and the revived past. We can hardly bear to recall the emotions of twenty or fifteen years ago, hardly at all, whereas we respond again quite vividly to the emotions of Jane Austen or Dickens, nearer a hundred years ago. There, the past is safely and finally past. The past of fifteen years ago is still yeastily working in us.