A Century On, Sardinia’s Nobel Laureate Grazia Deledda Still Deserves a Wider Audience

A hundred years on from when Grazia Deledda received the Nobel Prize for Literature, her name remains a mere murmur within English-language circles. The Sardinian author put pen to paper her first novel at twenty-one, and her output eventually reached over sixty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. A pioneer among women writers, she was the second such figure ever to take the prize, and her novels dwelt upon topics that stirred controversy in her homeland: divorce, women’s lives, and the concealed realms of rural Sardinia.

Journalists are questioning why an American publication in 1902 called her the “George Sand of Sardinia”, a title that arrived without a Nobel attached, while her work has remained largely unfamiliar beyond Italy’s borders. Part of the explanation rests in how outsiders have long dismissed the island itself.

A Poem Across the Sea

In 1893, Deledda composed her first published poem, sending it across the sea to Americans. Within it, she asked them to announce that Sardinia was still waiting to be found and known. That appeal proved to be far-seeing, even if she had no way of knowing that it would take a century before her message reached its intended audience.

Her debut novel, Fior di Sardegna (Flowers of Sardinia), appeared in 1892 when she was twenty-one. The story opens in the “stranger’s room” of the Porru house, where a woman sits crying. Deledda questions that “secret” in Sardinian life, five hundred years after Eleonora d’Arborea reigned as the de facto leader of the island. It was one of the first novels to deal with the theme of divorce, published in 1902.

The Nobel Win

1926 saw Deledda become the second woman in history to claim a Nobel prize for literature. The Nobel committee pointed to her “idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general.” as the reason for the award. At the time, Sardinia was hardly on the global map.

An American news story from the time noted that it was “strange” that she continued to write about Sardinia after she moved to Rome. “Sardinia holds very little interest for the world in general,” the story said. “It is not rich in artistic treasures as is most of Italy. Sardinia’s charm, perhaps, is its isolation; civilization has not as yet dulled it or cut it down to the standardized pattern.”

Throughout her career, that dismissal followed Deledda, and she was not alone in facing it. Antonio Gramsci, Emilio Lussu, Salvatore Satta, and contemporary writer Michela Murgia, fellow literary giants from Sardinia, all met the same skepticism.

Lawrence’s Sardinia

In 1921, D.W. Lawrence spent less than a week in Sardinia. He took no notes, he famously declared. From his arrival in Cagliari, a “naked town rising steep,” he and his wife took buses and trains, first to Mandas, “where there is nothing to do,” and then to Sorgono, full of “degenerate aborigines, the dirty-breasted host” and “sordid villagers.” They crossed the mountains until they arrived at Nuoro, the home of Deledda, where “there is nothing to see.”

When Lawrence came back to his home in Sicily, he said he found himself with nothing to do, and so he wrote Sea and Sardinia. He had first called it Sardinian Films or Sketches in Sardinia, and finished the book in just a few weeks, needing only one draft. The result was a place where funny yet plainly unpleasant character sketches were set down, as though Lawrence cared more about putting together characters for a novel than about catching hold of the island’s true shape.

Dial magazine in the United States published an early version of Lawrence’s work before it appeared in full. The New York Times began its own review with a flourish, opening with anyone hoping to visit Sardinia “would find no better guidebook.”.

A hundred years after its publication, Sea and Sardinia still stood as the most widely known book about Sardinia written in the English language.

Gitlin’s Rediscovery

In 1998, social critic Todd Gitlin wrote in the Chicago Tribune about stumbling upon a new species of novelist. His wife discovered a novel by Grazia Deledda in a corner of a bookstore in New England. He searched for the rest of her works, only finding them in small and university presses. He declared it was long overdue for a “literary resurrection” of the once famous writer with the “emotional power” of her novels.

In the end, he only found five of her thirty-three novels.

The Last Manuscript

Deledda died on August 15, 1936. Family members found that she had literally left a carefully wrapped package in the drawer of her desk, the manuscript for Cosima, “written in ink on light-blue paper.” Cosima, which was Deledda’s middle name, recounts the life of a young woman’s struggle to become a writer in Nuoro.

Deledda’s story is one of holding fast against being forgotten. As a teenager she published her first stories, which caused great displeasure among her family, who considered writing a scandalous pursuit for a young woman. She never ceased.

The Nobel Laureate published her debut novel, Fior di Sardegna, in 1892, and she took home the prize in 1926. She passed away in 1936. A hundred years on, her body of work still stands as a literary treasury worthy of a second look, even if it remains an enigma to some.

It is ironic that Deledda’s work is precisely what outsiders need to grasp about Sardinia. Her novels render the island with vivid detail, as the Nobel committee put it. They address human troubles in general, yet they do so through the specific perspective of a Sardinian upbringing.

It’s that particularity that gives her writing its value, worth rediscovering. Finding a prolific novelist who has been forgotten is like coming across a previously unknown species.

A literary treasure lies hidden within the mystery of Grazia Deledda, waiting for readers to uncover it once more.

Source material: “Remembering Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian Nobel Prize-Winner We Should All Be Reading,” Literary Hub.

Grazia Deledda · Italian literature · Nobel Prize · rediscovered authors · Sardinia