Matilde Serao's success as a novelist became most evident in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century and in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. Benedetto Croce, the most influential Italian literary critic of that time, acknowledged her success in his 1903 article "Note sulla letteratura italiana della seconda metà dell'Ottocento V: Matilde Serao." As a writer, she is often identified with a city; Naples, for example, implicitly serves as the real protagonist in many of her novels and short stories. In addition, Serao's narratives are grounded in her capacity to exploit realism. In extraordinary detail she portrays the sad material objects of poverty, the indigent economic conditions, the painstaking daily work of the poor, and their simple, elementary sufferings and aspirations--in short, the everyday reality of the least privileged. At the same time, although not all the people in her fiction belong to the...