Barolini began to work on the story inspired by her own maternal great-grandmother in 1969, although she did not work actively on what would become Umbertina until 1976, when she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Originally, Barolini conceived of the material in two separate parts—a novel that included the “Umbertina” and “Tina” sections, and a novel, entitled “The Last Abstraction,” containing the core of Marguerite’s story. Following her publisher’s suggestion, she merged the two novels into one, organized around three sections—one devoted to each woman—and a prologue on Marguerite. Umbertina is a sophisticated mélange of social, familial, and personal histories: in preparation for the book, Barolini conducted extensive archival research on the “Great Migration” of the last century, during which Italians emigrated from their homeland, most of them to the Americas and Australia, as well as an oral history project with Italian American women. She integrated the results of this research into her fictional account of family history (interview with Bonetti). This archival research also paved the way for The Dream Book, which Barolini describes as her “literary manifesto” and wrote as a response to “the neglect of Umbertina”—that neglect representing for her “the neglect of all works by Italian American women writers” (interview with Ahearn 47). Through her choice of women’s names as titles for the novel and each of its three sections, the author claims, immediately and unapologetically, the centrality of Italian American women’s stories. Indeed, there is a certain calculated defiance in the choice of a name such as Umbertina, so unquestionably Italian—the kind of Italian that resists domestication by English pronunciation.