Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda (born Sept. 27, 1871, Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy—died Aug. 15, 1936, Rome) was a novelist who was influenced by the verismo (q.v.; “realism”) school in Italian literature. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926.

Deledda married very young and moved to Rome, where she lived quietly, frequently visiting her native Sardinia. With little formal schooling, at age 17 Deledda wrote her first stories, based on sentimental treatment of folklore themes. With Il vecchio della montagna (1900; “The Old Man of the Mountain”) she began to write about the tragic effects of temptation and sin among primitive human beings.

Among her most notable works are Dopo il divorzio (1902; After the Divorce); Elias Portolu (1903), the story of a mystical former convict in love with his brother’s bride; Cenere (1904; Ashes; film, 1916, starring Eleonora Duse), in which an illegitimate son causes his mother’s suicide; and La madre (1920; The Woman and the Priest; U.S. title, The Mother), the tragedy of a mother who realizes her dream of her son’s becoming a priest only to see him yield to the temptations of the flesh. In these and others of her more than 40 novels, Deledda often used Sardinia’s landscape as a metaphor for the difficulties in her characters’ lives. The ancient ways of Sardinia often conflict with modern mores, and her characters are forced to work out solutions to their moral issues. Cosima, an autobiographical novel, was published posthumously in 1937.