Woman Writer in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity

Essays in this collection examine the processes underlying the formation of literary identity in four of the most important and widely-read Italian women novelists of the late 19th century, all of whom were in varying degrees involved in the ongoing debate on the changing role of women in Italian society at that time : Neera, Matilde Serao, the Marchesa Colombi, and Sibilla Aleramo. This study concentrates on the novelty and complexity of their enterprise as women writing in the specific social, cultural and literary context of late 19th-century Italy, and continues the project of reconstructing and mapping the place of women writers in the English and Continental traditions. A concluding chapter examines Luigi Pirandello's Suo Marita (1911), a relatively little-known novel portraying a woman writer in turn-of-the-century Italy from the perspective of a male writer.