The history of Helen Barolini’s first novel—the history of the material artifact itself—is sadly typical among works relegated to the category of “women’s novels.” While novels depicting men’s quests for autonomy and identity dominate lists of “great books” and “contemporary classics,” novels like Umbertina, which describe similar quests by women, seldom achieve anything close to such status. This is particularly true of novels that emerged from the reawakening of feminist consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, of which Umbertina is certainly one.4

At the same time, Umbertina’s history epitomizes the predicament of the Italian American literary tradition—and particularly of the Italian American women’s literary tradition—within which it must be placed. This tradition, while still in the process of being recognized—and recognizing as well as defining itself—is forcefully making its way onto the literary scene.5 That books such as Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish, Dorothy Bryant’s Miss Giardino, Ella Price’s Journal, and The Confessions of Madame Psyche, Diana Cavallo’s A Bridge of Leaves, and Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s The Right Thing To Do have recently been or will soon be reprinted testifies to the vitality of, and a new interest in, Italian American women’s literature. As Alice Walker has demonstrated through her fruitful uncovering of Zora Neale Hurston’s work, literary history cannot be transformed without the patient work of recovery; and without such recovery there would be no literature.6 This long overdue reprint of Umbertina—part of a larger publishing project through which The Feminist Press is making available the literature of Italian American and Italian women—offers the opportunity to assess where Italian American women’s literature stands through a retrospective look at Umbertina’s long journey.

Women writers from various ethnic groups—Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Cristina Garcia, Joanna Kadi, Leslie Marmon Silko—have shown how the telling of multigenerational stories helps the uprooted, the displaced, and the oppressed to maintain a sense of cultural belonging and legitimacy. The first novel by an Italian American woman to explore, in depth, intergenerational female relationships in an Italian immigrant family, Umbertina is set both in Italy and the United States, and provides a compelling exploration of life between different cultures and countries. Written during the 1970s—a time of ethnic revival, as well as feminist awakening—Umbertina is not concerned with ethnicity per se, but tells instead the stories of those who recognize themselves as “the poor of the earth” (41) and of their economically more fortunate descendants, revealing their conflicts, which are related to class as well as geographical mobility.7