Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, eds. A History of Women's Writing in Italy

Italica, Summer, 2002 by Laura A. Salsini

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

This splendid collection of essays tracing the development of women writing in Italy accomplishes two important objectives. The first is to "map out the main features of women as writers," along with the genres in which they worked, from the 1350s until the present (9). By presenting a comprehensive catalogue of these women, from famous and prolific authors engaged in such recognized genres as poetry and the novel, to lesser known artists who worked in the margins of canonic literature, the editors have succeeded in their second goal, that of creating a genealogy of female authors while reassessing "the question of women's relationship to the written word" (9). The depth of the female literary experience is evidenced by the frequency with which some authors appear and reappear in various essays, reflecting how they employed a variety of genres throughout their careers.

The brief introduction offers a historical overview of the obstacles women artists faced, from a lack of formal education to their confinement to the domestic sphere. But the rise of the vernacular allowed Italian women to participate more frequently in the creation of literature, and the invention of the printing press helped create a book-reading public that publishers were eager to satisfy. The introduction goes on to examine how key events in modern Italian life--from Unification to Fascism to feminism--also encouraged the emergence of an active and robust female literary presence.

The text proper consists of twenty essays contained in three sections, reflecting traditional historic divisions. The first section, covering the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation and the Seventeenth Century, looks at women who took up epistolary writing for either religious reasons or as a means for familial and civic education. During the fifteenth century, women involved in the Humanist movement wrote about female education and marriage reform, while others produced vernacular poetry and mystery plays. Women writers enjoyed their own Renaissance from 1500-1650, when lyric poetry, historical epics, and pastoral dramas flowered. Women also produced polemical essays addressing such moral and social issues as a woman's position within the bonds of marriage and women's equality with men. The section ends with an examination of religious and devotional writing, works often sanctioned and recognized by the Church.

Women's literary production took a slight dip during the Enlightenment and Restoration, the periods covered in the text's second and shortest section. However, the essays do explore how women artists contributed to the emerging genres of travel writing, journalism, and critical and scholarly writing.

The third and major section of the book takes us from the Risorgimento until 2000, with an "explosion of women writers" occurring in the late 1800s (165). These late nineteenth-century authors were primarily engaged in the relatively new (at least according to English or European standards) genre of the novel. While some produced texts in the style of verismo, others concentrated on the romanzo d'appendice, hugely popular with the public, although often ignored or denigrated by the (male) literary establishment. World War I brought a new wave of women writers, energized by the liberating tenets of Futurism. And while Fascism campaigned against professional women, writers during this era not only experimented with modernist techniques, they often addressed such issues as love, maternity, and ethnicity. The twentieth-century preoccupation with the novel also benefited the many female artists, who used the genre successively as a means for memoir or autobiography, as a vehicle to examine the political and theoretical concerns of the feminist movement, and as a way to address issues of historicity, female sexuality, and popular culture. Poetry has also proved a fertile field, with female artists moving from a focus on sentimental concerns at the end of the nineteenth century to more experimental forms reflecting the influence of both the world wars and the Hermetic movement and on to a more politically-engaged phase as they responded to the women's movement. Women artists came late to writing drama and screenplays but are now fully embarked in the creation of performance works. Finally, the text examines how women have contributed to the fields of aesthetics and critical writing, examining in particular the question of the relationship between women and art. These more philosophical writers also are responsible for the majority of feminist writings.

Recognizing the importance of bibliographic information, the editors end their text with a valuable fifty-five page guide to women writers, which includes thumbnail sketches of their lives, along with lists of their major works and select criticism. Throughout the book, the extent of the material presented on these authors, the thoughtful examination of their contributions (whether literary, social, or political), and the effort to situate the artists and the genre(s) they engaged in within their particular world creates a text that will prove immensely helpful for students and scholars at all levels.