SOURCE: Bullock, Alan. “Some Thoughts on Internal and External Monologue in the Writings of Natalia Ginzburg.” In Moving in Measure: Essays in Honour of Brian Moloney, edited by Judith Bryce and Doug Thompson, pp. 229-42. North Yorkshire: Hull University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Bullock traces Ginzburg's use of internal and external monologue in her work.

In 1963 Natalia Ginzburg was interviewed for the magazine L'Europeo by the well-known journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose report appeared in print on 14 July of that year under the title ‘Parole in famiglia’. In it Ginzburg describes how she emerged from a period of creative impotence or writer's block by discovering the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett during the three years she spent in London, from 1959 to 1961. Her return to creative writing with renewed vigour and a desire to make full use of a new ability to produce dialogue of her own—an ability which...