Gender, confession and ethnicity: women writers and Trieste

Abstract

Located on the north-eastern border of Italy, Trieste was incorporated within Italy in 1918, when it lost the central position it had enjoyed for centuries as the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, becoming financially and historically marginal. Though speaking predominantly Italian, or, rather, a Venetian-based dialect, the local population was ethnically mixed. To this date Trieste remains a border city, weighed down by its peripheral position vis-a-vis Italy, on one side, and the Balkans on the other. Traditionally, many women from Trieste wrote and published, arguably more so than anywhere else in Italy, due to better and more sustained access to education under Austria-Hungary. This article discusses a number of women writers from Trieste with a view to reassessing the role they played in constructing the myth of Trieste in opposition to widespread local discourses, such as italianita, triestinita and ‘border anxiety’. In Allieve di Quarta, the Jewish novelist Haydee pursues a nationalist agen...