I recently came upon the name of the Italian writer Grazia Deledda. She was the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and only the second woman in general after Selma Lagerlöf was awarded hers in 1909.
Deledda was highly regarded in her day, although her name is little known in the English speaking world today. Fortunately for me , four of her novels were translated into English years ago and are available for downloading at Project Gutenberg.
Dopo il divorzio (After the Divorce)
Cenere (Ashes)
La Madre (The Woman & the Priest)
Nostalgie (Nostalgia)
Of these four novels, the only one of which I could find a description was After the Divorce. The one paragraph long synopsis from Wikipedia follows:
"This tragedy is set in Sardinia. Constantino Ledda is convicted on charges for murdering his wicked uncle. Constantino is innocent, but he accepts the verdict because of his wife, Giovanna. After Constantino is convicted, Giovanna has no economic means to support her family, so she divorces her husband and remarries, this time to a wealthy but cruel landowner. Constantino is released after the real killer confesses, and he and Giovanna start a forbidden romance".
That short synopsis was enough to interest me in reading the novel, although the description doesn't really do justice to the novel. There are, quite naturally, heavy Catholic overtones, especially on the subject of marriage and divorce.
This is something a little odd about the novel and it's translation. The original Italian was published in 1902, but the story begins in 1904. The English translation was published in 1905 with the story beginning in 1907. I have no idea why the later dates were used in the story.
I'll be going next to Cenere (Ashes).
As an aside - in the last three novels that I've read, Crime and Punishment, The Red and the Black, and After the Divorce, the protagonist is imprisoned after being convicted of murder, although the end result is very different for each one.
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