Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante (Rome, 1912 – Rome, 1985) was an Italian novelist, poet, translator and children's author, and one of the most important Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century. She wrote in Italian, and her work still draws readers because it moves easily between historical events, myth and personal memory.

She was born in Rome and grew up in the working-class Testaccio district. Her mother, Irma Poggibonsi, was a schoolteacher from a Jewish family. Morante was registered as the daughter of Augusto Morante, a warden at a juvenile correctional institution, but later in life she learned that her biological father was Francesco Lo Monaco, a postal clerk and a neighbour of the family. Poor health kept her out of primary school, and she educated herself largely on her own. In the mid-1930s she began publishing short stories, some of them for children, in magazines. She left university without finishing and, while still very young, moved out to live alone by giving private lessons.

Her first book, Il gioco segreto, appeared in 1941, the same year she married the novelist Alberto Moravia, whom she had met in 1936. The marriage was turbulent, marked by separations and reconciliations. The couple moved in a circle of leading Italian writers and thinkers, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini. Near the end of the war, fearing persecution because of their Jewish background, they fled Rome and took refuge in Sant'Agata, near Fondi, where they lived in the same austere conditions as the local peasant families. That experience left a lasting mark on her later fiction.

Her breakthrough came with Menzogna e sortilegio (1948), which won the Viareggio Prize, and above all with L'isola di Arturo (1957), a novel of growing up with a fairy-tale imagination that won the Strega Prize. Her style blends lyricism, myth and recollection. Her characters often seek love to make up for emptiness left by childhood, and recurring concerns include narcissism, motherhood and autobiography as a way of finding relief. After separating from Moravia in 1961, she wrote only sporadically and destroyed much of what she had produced until then.

In 1974 she published La storia, a chronicle of Rome during the Second World War seen through the eyes of ordinary people. It sold very well, although parts of the left-wing literary establishment attacked it harshly. Her final novel, Aracoeli (1982), is often read as a summary of her main themes. After a suicide attempt in 1983 and a second operation, she died in Rome in November 1985. Her legacy lies in the Italian fiction of the twentieth century, in her sensitivity to childhood, and in her way of viewing history from everyday life.