It is this old Sardinia, at last being brought to heel, which is the real theme of Grazia Deledda’s books. She is fascinated by her island and its folks, more than by the problems of the human psyche. And therefore this book, The Mother, is perhaps one of the least typical of her novels, one of the most ‘continental.’ Because here, she has a definite universal theme: the consecrated priest and the woman. But she keeps on forgetting: her theme. She becomes more interested in the death of the old hunter, in the doings of the boy Antiochus, in the exorcizing of the spirit from the little girl possessed. She is herself somewhat bored by the priest’s hesitations; she shows herself suddenly impatient, a pagan sceptical of the virtues of chastity, even in consecrated priests; she is touched yet annoyed by the pathetic, tiresome old mother who made her son a priest out of ambition, and who simply expires in the terror of a public exposure: and, in short, she makes a bit of a mess of the book, because she started a problem she didn’t quite dare to solve. She shirks the issue atrociously. But neither will the modern spirit solve the problem by killing off the fierce instincts that made the problem. As for Grazia Deledda, first she started by sympathizing with the mother, and then must sympathize savagely with the young woman, and then can’t make up her mind. She kills off the old mother in disgust at the old woman’s triumph, so leaving the priest and the young woman hanging in space. As a sort of problem-story, it is disappointing. No doubt, if the priest had gone off with the woman, as he first intended, then all the author’s sympathy would have fallen to the old abandoned mother. As it is, the sympathy falls between two stools, and the title La Madre is not really justified. The mother turns out not to be the heroine.

But the interest of the book lies, not in plot or characterization, but in the presentation of sheer instinctive life. The love of the priest for the woman is sheer instinctive passion, pure and undefiled by sentiment. As such it is worthy of respect, for in other books on this theme the instinct is swamped and extinguished in sentiment. Here, however, the instinct of direct sex is so strong and so vivid, that only the other blind instinct of mother-obedience, the child-instinct, can overcome it. All the priest’s education and Christianity are really mere snuff of the candle. The old, wild instinct of a mother’s ambition for her son defeats the other wild instinct of sexual mating. An old woman who has never had any sex life – and it is astonishing, in barbaric half-civilization, how many people are denied a sex life – she succeeds, by her old barbaric maternal power over her son, in finally killing his sex life too. It is the suicide of semi-barbaric natures under the sway of a dimly comprehended Christianity, and falsely conceived ambition.