SOURCE: A foreword to A Music behind the Wall: Selected Stories, Vol. 1, by Anna Maria Ortese, translated by Henry Martin, McPherson & Company, 1994, pp. 7-9.

Martin has translated some of Ortese's work into English. In the essay below, he comments on the major themes and ideas that inform Ortese's fiction.

Anna Maria Ortese's first volume of shorter fictions, Angelici dolori, appeared in 1937, her seventh and most recent, In sonno e in veglia, in 1987. The present collection of her stories in English translation [A Music behind the Wall] ranges through the whole of these fifty years and touches nearly all the modes of storytelling which have characterized her creative life. The early work was once described as "magical realism." The middle period of work made that somewhat cumbersome adjective recede. The recent work lies at the edges of fable. Or perhaps it suggests the existence of a genre of "metafable...