SOURCE: Bullock, Alan. “Female Alienation: Childhood and First Youth.” In Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World, pp. 64-91. New York: Berg, 1991.

In the following essay, Bullock explores the impact Ginzburg's childhood had on her work.

Melancholy … is the prime characteristic of Ginzburg's fiction …¹

The overwhelming sadness which led Natalia Ginzburg to compose her poem on the death of love at the age of twelve is the first known indication of her most striking characteristic: a preference for themes and situations that are elegiac if not uncompromisingly pessimistic. Once consciously identified five years later as a major stimulus for her creative writing it has rarely been abandoned, becoming something of a leit-motif, freely acknowledged by Ginzburg in her admission over forty years on that ‘As a rule I create while immersed in sadness’,² and leading her to focus her attention almost exclusively on the difficulties implicit in...