‘Io non so se questi miei poveri appunti […] cadranno mai sotto gli occhi di qualcuno’: Fictional Diaries in Nineteenth-Century Italian Women’s Writing

Abstract

This article examines the literary form of the fictional diary in Italian women’s writing from the nineteenth century, focusing especially on the post-Unification period. Following an introduction to the fictional diary, which outlines historical and social considerations pertaining to the situation of Italian women in the Ottocento, touching also upon questions of genre, the article analyses the presence and functions of the fictional diary in two works: Ida Baccini’s Il romanzo d’una maestra (1901) and Tommasina Guidi’s Ho una casa mia! Ricordi di una giovane sposa (1879). The readings of these two texts demonstrate that the fictional diary has an invaluable contribution to make to our understanding of nineteenth-century Italian women’s writing, thanks to its thematic and formal points of convergence with other genres (most notably, with the novel and conduct literature). In particular, the hybrid genre of the fictional diary reveals the extent to which even ‘creative’ forms of writing may be coloured by an underlying prescriptive agenda.