Abstract
❦As the first avowedly feminist novel in the Italian tradition, Sibilla Aleramo’s 1906 Una donna occupies the space that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own occupies for the Anglo-American tradition, and has been the object of similar veneration. After all, Aleramo’s autobiographical protagonist commits the cultural crime of leaving her child in order to live a life of her own, and break the “monstrous chain” that links mothers to daughters, forming a continuum of maternal sacrifice. 1 Our sympathy is with her predicament. But contemporary readers may be less sympathetic with aspects of her prose that I, for one, have always found almost unbearable: the trailing off of sentences as they sink into sentimentality, the overuse of points of suspension. Take the following episode, for example. Towards the end of the autobiographical novel, the protagonist has announced to her brutish husband her intention to separate from him, remain in Rome, and make a living on her own. The husband covers her with vile insult, beats her, and threatens, in the child’s presence, to take the child away with him. The thought is unbearable to her:
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