Matilde Serao
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Matilde Serao | |
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| Born | 14 March 1856 Patras, Greece |
| Died | 25 July 1927 (aged 71) Naples, Kingdom of Italy |
| Spouse | Edoardo Scarfoglio |
Matilde Serao (Italian pronunciation: [maˈtilde seˈraːo]; Greek: Ματθίλδη Σεράο; 14 March 1856 – 25 July 1927) was an Italian journalist, novelist, publisher and newspaper editor. She was the first woman appointed to edit an Italian newspaper, Il Corriere di Roma and later Il Giorno. Serao was also the co-founder and editor of the Naples-based newspaper Il Mattino, and the author of several novels. She never won the Nobel Prize in Literature despite being nominated on six occasions.[1]
Biography
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Serao was born in Patras, Greece to an Italian father, Francesco Serao, and a Greek mother, Paolina Borely (or Bonelly).[2][3] Her father, a journalist, had emigrated to Greece from Naples for political reasons.[3][4]
In 1860, the family moved back to Italy, first to Carinola and then to Naples. Serao grew up in poverty and worked as a schoolmistress, an experience later described in the preface to her collection of short stories Leggende Napolitane (Napoletan Legends, 1881). She first gained notoriety after publishing short stories in Il Piccolo, a newspaper edited by Rocco de Zerbi. Her first novel, Fantasia (Fantasy, 1883), was well received, and Serao was hailed as an author capable of writing with sentiment and analytical subtleties.
Serao spent the years between 1880 and 1886 in Rome, where she wrote five volumes of short stories and novels, all dealing with the struggles of ordinary people, and distinguished by great accuracy of observation and depth of insight: Cuore infermo (1881), Fior di passione (1883), La conquista di Roma (1885), La Virtù di checchina (1884), and Piccole anime (1883).
In 1885 Serao and her husband, Edoardo Scarfoglio, founded Il Corriere di Roma, the first attempt to model a daily journal along the lines of the Parisian press in Italy. The paper was short-lived, and after its demise, Serao moved to Naples, where she edited Il Corriere di Napoli. In 1892, she co-founded Il Mattino with her husband, which became the most important and most widely read daily paper of southern Italy. In 1904 she helped establishing the national newspaper "Il Giorno", where she would work until her death. The high demands placed by a career in journalism and publishing did not limit Serao's literary activity; between 1890 and 1902, she wrote eight novels – Il paese di cuccagna, Il ventre di Napoli, Addio amore, All'erta sentinella, Castigo, La ballerina, Suor Giovanna della Croce and Paese di Gesù. All were praised for Serao's ability to capture the personal traits of her characters and render them with sensitive power and sympathetic breadth of spirit. Although most of Serao's novels have been translated into English, a few works are only available in Italian. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing writes in his diary that between November 1894 and early January 1895 he read three of Serao's novels, "Gli Amanti", "Cuore Infermo" and "Fantasia", in the original Italian.[5]
Although Serao was a contributor to the Fascist women's magazine, Lidel,[6] she would later be a signatory of the 1925 Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.[citation needed]
Serao died in 1927 in Naples.
Publications
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Novels and novellas[edit]
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Short Story Collections[edit]
Essays[edit]
Other writings[edit]
Works translated in English[edit]
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References
[edit]- ↑ "Nomination Database". www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2017-04-19.
- ↑ Romani, Gabriella (2006). "Matilde Serao (1856–1927)." In: Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies. New York: Routledge, p. 1735.
- 1 2 Warner, Charles Dudley (1896). Library of the World's Best Literature: Ancient and Modern. International Society. p. 13133. ISBN 978-0-8108-0521-7.
{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) - ↑ Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz (2000-01-01). Gambling, Game, and Psyche. SUNY Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-7914-4383-5.
Matilde Serao ( 1856–1907 ) was born in Patras, Greece, to a Greek mother and to a Neapolitan journalist father who had been forced into exile in 1848 because of his anti-Bourbon stand.
- ↑ Coustillas, Pierre ed. London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: the Diary of George Gissing, Novelist. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978, pp.351-3.
- ↑ Eugenia Paulicelli (2002). "Fashion, the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy". Gender & History. 14 (3): 552. doi:10.1111/1468-0424.00281.
Further reading
[edit]- Gisolfi, Anthony M. (1967). "The Dramatic Element in Matilde Serao's Little Masterpieces," Italica, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 433–445.
- Gisolfi, Anthony M. (1968). The Essential Matilde Serao. New York: Las Americas Publishing Company.
- James, Henry (1914). "Matilde Serao." In: Notes on Novelists. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 294–313.
- Kennard, Joseph Spencer (1906). "Matilde Serao." In: Italian Romance Writers. New York: Brentano's, pp. 273–301.
- Russo, Teresa G. (1997). "Matilde Serao: A True Verista for the Female Character," International Social Science Review, Vol. 72, No. 3/4, pp. 122–135.
Sources
[edit]- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Serao, Matilda". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
External links
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- Matilde Serao at the Women Film Pioneers Project
- Works by Matilde Serao at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Matilde Serao at the Internet Archive
- Works by Matilde Serao at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
| International | |
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| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
- 1856 births
- 1927 deaths
- 19th-century Italian women writers
- 19th-century Neapolitan people
- 20th-century Italian novelists
- 20th-century Italian women writers
- Burials at the Cemetery of Poggioreale
- Greek emigrants
- Immigrants to Italy
- Italian anti-fascists
- Italian newspaper editors
- Italian newspaper founders
- Italian people of Greek descent
- Italian women editors
- Italian women journalists
- Italian women newspaper editors
- Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals
- Women film pioneers
- Writers from Patras
