Her first published work, which appeared when she was sixteen, aroused tremendous criticism of the kind that was to haunt her most of her life. In the closed society of Sardinia, women were not supposed to be writers and certainly were not supposed to write about their own people, showing their weaknesses and their flaws. Even the great Pirandello joined the critics who made fun of Deledda. One of his stories is a thinly-veiled sarcastic assessment of her life and work; and on occasion he was said to have referred to her husband as “Signor Deledda.” Pirandello may also have been somewhat annoyed (to put it mildly) that this uneducated woman should have received the Nobel Prize for Literature – and, to make matters worse, should have received it before Pirandello himself won the same coveted award in 1934.

But it wasn’t just others writers and critics who tried to put her down. Her own people, as Kozma points out, “brutalized” her; “she was made to feel guilty all her life for the mere act of writing, not for what she wrote. Arnaldo Fratelli reminisces about the inevitable local scandals that ensued whenever she published anything at all and then word got back to town that she was the author; the people in her hometown could not comprehend ‘how she could write about such things without having done them’.” (33)

On the other side, there were writers like D. H. Lawrence, who not only admired her ability to penetrate the psyche and explore motivations, but actually translated some of Deledda’s stories. In the introduction to his translation of La madre, Lawrence wrote (cited by Kozma): “She does more than just reproduce the transitory psychological positions of her age. She has real underpinnings and deals with something more fundamental than sophisticated sentimentality . . . what she really does is create the passionate complex of primitive mass” (49).

In her brief conclusion, Kozma thus sums up the incredible story of the first woman writer of modern Italy: “The probabilities were slight for Grazia Deledda to have flourished even as a minor, regional, literary footnote, much less to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Personally and professionally she was insulted and savaged by her family, her home town, her fellow islanders, and her professional peers. Yet she etched her name into the history of literature by dint of her own sheer will to succeed. Against all odds and despite all the critical cross-talk, she left a compelling body of work where, within the context of an intuitive and almost preternatural feminism, prophetically there dwell most of the accepted characteristics of arrested maturation and its attendant manifestations vis-à-vis male/female relations.” (51)

In addition to a long introductory chapter (1) in which she provides a brief view of Sardinia in the mid-to-late 1800s and a summary of Deledda’s “Critical (Mis-) Fortunes,” Kozma provides the reader with four more chapters and a brief “Conclusion.” The volume also carries a three-page “Appendix,” listing Deledda’s prose works; a long section of “Notes” (pp. 161-199); 10 pages of “Works Cited”; and a 4-page “Index.”

–A. P. Book Digest, Volume II, Number 4

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