by Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia, to Francesca Cambosu and Giovanni Antonio Deledda, a notary and small businessman. Deledda’s early life was marked by loss. Two sisters died, one at birth and the other of trachoma at the age of six. Disgrace fell upon another sister, Beppa, when she was abandoned by her fiancé. Deledda’s father died in 1892, after which one of her brothers ended up in jail for theft while another, alcoholic brother squandered the rest of the family estate. Despite these tribulations, Deledda achieved a remarkable literary career for a Sardinian woman of her day. In 1926 she became the second Italian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (after the poet Giosue Carducci in 1906) and the second female Nobel laureate in the world (after Sweden’s Selma Lagerlöf in 1909). She reached these heights after schooling herself for...