About midway in her literary career, in an autobiographical sketch published in Ritratti su misura di scrittori italiani (Portraits Made to Measure of Italian Writers, 1960), Anna Banti described her fiction as having moved away from introspection to subjects outside herself without, however, having abandoned the particular point of view on the world that her largely female protagonists express: "Questo punto di vista che io credo onesto (ciascuno deve parlare di quel che sa) e anche utile (non sempre gli uomini capiscono le donne, e viceversa) ha una sua morale che non è moralismo, ma profonda attenzione verso i più chiusi problemi umani" (This point of view, which I consider honest [one must speak of what one knows] and also useful [men do not always understand women, and vice versa], has a moral, not a moralistic dimension: an attentive concentration on the most hidden human problems). In a...