Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, in the mountainous interior of Sardinia, the fourth of seven children in a middle-class family. Her formal schooling ended with the elementary grades; beyond that she had a private tutor and her own reading. Her family did little to encourage her writing, yet she published her first story while still in her teens, followed by early fiction in magazines, a story collection in 1890 and a first novel, Fior di Sardegna, in 1892.

In 1900 she married Palmiro Madesani, a civil servant, and moved to Rome, where — while raising two sons — she kept to a disciplined routine and produced roughly a novel a year. Elias Portolu (1903), the story of a former convict torn by forbidden love, brought her wide success; it was followed by Ashes (1904), filmed in 1916 with Eleonora Duse in her only screen role, and Reeds in the Wind (1913), her most popular book. Her fiction is rooted in the customs and harsh landscapes of Sardinia and peopled by outsiders who struggle silently with sin, guilt and fate. It owes something to Giovanni Verga’s verismo and to the decadent atmosphere of D’Annunzio, though her style is plainer than either.

Deledda received the Nobel Prize for 1926 — the first Italian woman to do so, and the second woman after Selma Lagerlöf. She went on writing as her health failed, and died of breast cancer in Rome in 1936. Cosima, a lightly fictionalised account of her youth, was published the following year. Her childhood home in Nuoro is now a museum.