Hardcover Edition
ISBN: 9781558615533
Publication Date: 07-07-2007

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Translated by Elise Magistro
Preface by Fred Gardaphe
Introduction and Afterword by Elise Magistro

With an ear for dialogue that may be compared to Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, and Ernest Hemingway, the Sicilian writer Maria Messina (1887 - 1944) presents the captivating and brutal realities of women living in early-twentieth-century Italy in this first collection of her work available in English.

Behind Closed Doors portrays the habits and gestures, the words spoken and those left unsaid, of individuals caught between the traditions they respect and a desire to ease the social restrictions in their lives. Messina’s stories reveal a world in which women are shuttered in their houses, virtual servants to their families, and working men immigrate to the United States in fortune-seeking droves. It is also a world of unstated privileges in which habits and implied commands perpetuate women’s servitude.

A cultural album that captures the lives of peasant, working-class, and middle-class women, this volume will appeal to millions of Italian descendants and readers everywhere fascinated by Italian history.

“[T]hese ten persuasive tales offer stark, finely drawn portraits of poor and middle-class Sicilian women in the early years of the twentieth century.” —New York Review of Books

“A window into another time and another culture. . . . We understand the emotions of [the] characters, simultaneously victims and heroines. . . . Messina’s words will leave their mark. Their power makes them impossible to forget.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Virtually the only great Italian fiction about the massive Sicilian immigration to America written while it was happening . . . honed, polished, devastatingly direct—verismo at its unsentimental best.” —Booklist