Rummaging through a pile of books on the clearance table of a large bookstore in New Jersey, I see an old edition of Umbertina, half-hidden beneath cookbooks, collections of nursery rhymes, and self-help books. Ironically, only a couple of years ago I searched for Umbertina in this same bookstore without any luck.1 In a second I can come up with a list of twenty people who have been looking for this novel, in bookstores across the United States, to no avail. Although I own a copy, I feel compelled to rescue and take home, for a dollar, this small book, its print so tiny as to discourage any potential readers not equipped with phenomenal eyesight.

A stubborn book, Umbertina has managed to make its way to readers in spite of its crippling publishing history. The hardcover edition, published by Seaview in 1979, was promoted as a “family saga” and achieved modestly respectable sales, but went out of print after only three years. Two more editions were subsequently published.2 The first was a mass-market paperback published by Bantam, which misjudged the book to be a romance novel. The cover of that edition, which depicted “three women, hair streaming romantically . . . spoke of a work the book did not represent” (Barolini). As Barolini recalls, “the public for which the book was meant never saw it.” Sales were poor, by mass-market standards, and in 1982 Bantam called Barolini to inform her that the book would be shredded. The American Italian Historical Association bought several hundred copies, which allowed for some distribution of the book among its members, but over 100,000 copies were shredded. Another paperback edition was published by Ayer in 1988, but it was so poorly produced—its type reduced to an almost illegible size—that the author agreed to forgo royalties in order to have the rights revert back to her.

Undoubtedly, Umbertina suffered, during this unfortunate history, from misguided positioning by its publishers. But even more essentially, it suffered at the hands of a literary establishment unable to conceive of a novel dealing with women’s experience or Italian American experience as worthy of serious critical attention or a lasting place in American letters. It is interesting to note that while Umbertina was reviewed by numerous newspapers in smaller cities with large ethnic populations, it was virtually ignored by the kinds of prestigious publications capable of setting a novel on the path toward contemporary canonization. This fate—common to the works of Italian American women authors3—has deprived Umbertina, until now, of the recognition it deserves.