“A novel of daring and intense imagery crafted out of the harsh rhythms of Italian immigrant life. De Rosa’s lyricism is not a sweetly coated nostalgia. She holds this remembered world in a rough, respectful embrace.”

—Janet Zandy, author of Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writings

The Silent Duchess

Dacia Maraini

eISBN: 9781558617834 | ISBN: 9781558612228

Set in Sicily in the early eighteenth-century, the novel tells the story of Marianna, the daughter of an aristocratic family and the victim of a mysterious childhood trauma that has left her deaf and mute, trapped in a world of silence. In luminous language that conveys both the keen visual sight and the deep human insight possessed by her remarkable main character, Dacia Maraini captures the splendor and the corruption of Marianna’s world and the strength of her unbreakable spirit.

“Maraini brilliantly conveys the mixture of luxury and squalor in which the Sicilian aristocracy lived. . . . The Silent Duchess manages totally to overpower the reader with its narrative urgency. . . . Since she won the Prix Formentor in 1963, Dacia Maraini has produced nothing finer than this.”

—Evening Standard, London

“This is a novel of the greatest vividness. It arouses intense feeling. It provokes thought. It invites the reader into a world which is very different from that in which we live, and yet immediately recognizable as true and valid. . . . It is illuminating, moving, and entrancing.”

—The Scotsman, Edinburgh

“The Silent Duchess has a subtlety of perception, a delicacy in probing emotions and above all, an elusive feel for history itself. . . . The narrative has the richness of a saga. . . . This history of a woman’s quest for dignity is an astonishing achievement.”

—The Independent, London

Unspeakable Women

Robin Pickering-Iazzi

ISBN: 9781558610637

Despite the misogynist ideology of Italian Fascism, and contrary to claims of most postwar literary histories and anthologies, in the 1920s and 1930s, women authors enjoyed wide publication and critical recognition in Italy. From the cultural pages of important Italian newspapers of the period, Robin Pickering-Iazzi chose 16 stories unavailable for over 60 years, including three by Grazia Deledda, the 1926 Nobel Prize winner. All offer evidence of resistance to the self-sacrificing ideal of the “New Woman” of Fascism.

“This impassioning book is a perfect introduction to leading women writers of early twentieth-century Italy. Expertly presented by Pickering-Iazzi and luminously translated, their stories are at once disquieting and pleasurable. Probing the nature of desire and devotion, they veritably entreat the reader to know more about their authors, their other writing, and their lives and times under fascist rule.”

—Victoria de Grazia, author of How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945

“Robin Picering-Iazzi has done a unique service in translating these stories and providing as well a compelling historical and social frame from within which to read them. Iazzi describes graphically how ‘standards’ of style and theme, controlled by political or literary power groups, managed the disappearance of Italian women writers from the canon and from literary history.”

—Helen Barolini, editor of The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women