A timid and insecure young writer in the early 1960s, Dacia Maraini established herself as a significant novelist, poet, and playwright in the 1970s. She is closely identified with feminism, but it would be a mistake to view her work only through a feminist lens. She is a contemporary writer committed to feminism who offers a socially provoking view of the human condition, often focusing on but not limited to women.

Dacia Maraini was born in Florence on 11 November 1936 into a cultured and aristocratic family that had lost much of its wealth and social prestige. Her father, Fosco Maraini, was a well-known ethnographer who published several successful books on Japan. Maraini's mother, Topazia Alliata, was a Sicilian noblewoman from Bagheria whose family flourished in the eighteenth century. Both parents were nonconformists, as Maraini relates in Bagheria (1993), an engaging book of autobiographical recollections centering on the coastal town near...