Public History, Private Stories

Explores the way Italian women writers craft identities through writing. In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiographya public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over womens roles, both traditional and transgressive. Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian woman -Camilla Fa Gonzagas 1622 memoiras her beginning point, citing it as a central pre-text. In her memoir, Gonzaga makes explicit her conflict over the public silence imposed on her, yet succeeds in writing herself into history through self-narrative. Parati then examines Enif Roberts autobiography, in which Robert strives to enter the public sphere of the post-World War I futurist movement by writing about her fight to overcome cancer of the uterus. Next, Parati considers Fausta Cialentes life story, an account of her family's life in Trieste from World War I through the fascist era, as well as the narrative in which Rita Levi Montalcini describes her life as a woman, a Nobel-Prize winning scientist, and a Jew who lived under fascism in the thirties and forties. Finally, Parati analyzes Luisa Passerini's look back on her involvement with the student movement of 1968. Through her discussion of these womens writings, Parati demonstrates the complex negotiations over identity contained within them, negotiations that challenge dichotomies between male and female, maternal and paternal, and private and public. Public History, Private Stories is a compelling exploration of the disparate identities created by these women through the act of writing autobiography.