In The Dance of the Necklace, Grazia Deledda moves away from the countryside of her native Sardinia to create a classically modern, urban narrative. Writing in a more spare, experimental style, she uncovers the "vain anguish of our strongest passions: love, ambition, and the instinct to appear more than what we are."
A pearl necklace symbolizes the "dance" of jealousy, greed, and love, both erotic and familial, which unites and divides the three main characters: an aunt and her niece who share the same name and a young count seeking to regain his family's bartered string of pearls.
An innocent deception turns on itself to explore the nature of the double and the mask: two topoi of modernity. Like Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Annie Ernaux, Deledda delves into what it means to be a woman, alone and aging, living in a world where she is increasingly unwanted and invisible despite her lingering desires.
According to the critic Margherita Heyer-Caput, the novel is one of Deledda's "most conscious and disquieting expressions of modernity." It challenges the labels often applied to this writer and overturns established critical categories to question margin-center hierarchies applied to her work. The Dance of the Necklace is a remarkable and rare example of Deledda's modernism.
First English translation of La Danza della Collana (1924).
Introduction, notes, bibliography.
124 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. Grazia Deledda became, in 1926, the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. 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, two plays by Pirandello - Six Characters in Search of an Author (Italica Press, 2013) and Henry IV (Italica Press, 2016) - and Grazia Deledda's novel Ivy (L'Edera) (Italica Press, 2019). 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, two plays by Pirandello - Six Characters in Search of an Author (Italica Press, 2013) and Henry IV (Italica Press, 2016) - and Grazia Deledda's novel Ivy (Italica Press, 2019).
