Annesa, one of Grazia Deledda's most enigmatic and dramatic characters, battles with a guilt she suffers when her own strength tempts her to a crime that will save others who won't save themselves. Annesa has tragically attached herself to the tree of the Decherchi family, once noble but now dry-rotting on hard times. Her lover, Paulu Decherchi, compares her to a suffocating ivy clinging to the dead trunk.
Distraught almost to the point of madness, Annesa finally cuts herself free from her adopted family. Escaping arrest for a wealthy relative's death -- and fleeing the men who dictate the laws that control the lives of women and the poor -- she imposes her own punishment of exile. But she will return to the impoverished Decherchis to complete her penance after she has purified her soul and found her own peace.
Annesa's fate and destiny are co-joined to the wild Sardinian landscape, described in Ivy with a passion only hinted at in Deledda's other works. Its brooding and wild mountains scarred with haunted caves create an atmosphere weighed down by poverty, prejudice, and ill omen.
Many consider Ivy to be Deledda's best work, surpassing even Elias Portolu and Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento). Here she deeply probes the misguided but altruistic motivation of a woman totally dependent on others who lack her own moral fortitude.
Deledda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, writing fiction set in Sardinia, mining it deeply and evoking its people and their character. Ivy, Deledda's third novel, was originally published in 1908 in Italian as L'Edera and has never been previously published in English.
First English translation. Introduction, notes, bibliography. 198 pages.
Author Biography:
Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. She had a limited formal education, but was an avid reader. She published her first story in 1886 when she was fifteen, in a newspaper in Nuoro. Her stories continued to be published in one of the many fashion magazines of the late nineteenth century, Ultima Moda. Although the dismay of her family and friends distressed her, it also strengthened her resolve to succeed. In 1899 she left Nuoro and went to Cagliari, where she met and married Palmiro Madesani. A year later they moved to Rome, where Deledda lived a quiet life with her husband and two sons until her death in 1936, at sixty-five. Deledda wrote thirty-three novels and many books of short stories, almost all of them set in Sardinia. Among her better-known novels are "Elias Portolu," "Canne al vento" (published by Italica Press in 1998 as "Reeds in the Wind"), "La madre," "Annalena Bilsini," and "Cosima" (Italica Press, 1988), her posthumous autobiographical novel. Mary Ann Frese Witt is Professor Emerita of Italian, French, and Comparative Literature at North Carolina State University. Her books include "The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France" (Cornell University Press, 2001) and "Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque" (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). She has published numerous articles on Pirandello and modern theater. In collaboration with Martha King, she is the translator of Pirandello's novel "Her Husband" (Duke University Press, 2000). In collaboration with Martha Witt, she has translated and published contemporary Italian short stories and most recently two plays by Pirandello: "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (Italica Press, 2013) and "Henry IV" (Italica Press, 2016). Martha Witt is Professor of English and Creative Writing at William Paterson University. She is the author of the novel, "Broken As Things Are" (Holt, 2004/Picador, 2005). Her translations and short fiction have appeared in multiple anthologies and international literary journals. In collaboration with Mary Ann Frese Witt, she has translated and published contemporary Italian short stories and most recently two plays by Pirandello: "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (Italica Press, 2013) and "Henry IV" (Italica Press, 2016).
