Grazia Deledda was the only Italian woman--and, after Selma Lagërlof of Sweden, the second of a total of nine women writers in the world--to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, which she was awarded in 1926. Her name thus stands out in the Italian canon as a significant example for all the female writers who have succeeded her. Her fiction is profoundly rooted in Sardinian ethics and history and expands on the universal themes of love, money, death, and family relationships.

Deledda was born Grazia Maria Cosima Deledda on 21 September 1871 in Nuoro on the island of Sardinia. The daughter of wealthy landowners Giovanni Antonio and Francesca Cambosu Deledda, she was, as she described herself in the 1937 autobiographical work Cosima (Cosima, 1937; translated 1988), "una bambina bruna, con gli occhi castanei, limpidi e grandi, le mani e i piedi minuscoli, vestita di un grembiale grigiastro con le tasche, con le...