Her Husband (27 page)

Pirandello was undoubtedly right when he said that his original
interests in satirizing Grazia Deledda’s husband along with the literary scene of the new Rome were only points of departure. His real interest lies in exploring the relationship between femininity and creativity, an interest that takes his artistry far beyond his own time and his own prejudices to chart new territory. His intricate and subtle explorations of the mind of the woman writer, of the relations between creation and procreation, and the contradictions inherent in literature as art and literature as business, speak to the preoccupations of the twenty-first century as they did to those of the first years of the 1900s.

1
Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano, 25 April 1905,
Studi sardi
, vol. 19 (Sassari: Gallizzi, 1966). Four unpublished letters from Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano.

2
Palmiro Madesani to Georges Hérelle, 5 February 1906. Transcribed by Rosaria Taglialatela from the collection in the Bibliothèque nationale in Troyes for her unpublished dissertation.

3
Remo Branca,
Il segreto di Grazia Deledda
(Cagliari: Editrice Sarda Fossataro, 1971), 111.

4
Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano, from Rome, 12 November 1902.

5
Grazia Deledda to Madesani, 13 July 1910,
Onoranze a Grazia Deledda
, ed. Mario Ciusa Romagna, Nuoro, Sardinia, 1959.

6
Luigi Pirandello to Ugo Ojetti, 18 December 1908, in Carteggi
inediti
(Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 28.

7
M. Grillandi,
Emilio Treves
(Torino: UTET, 1977), 590-91.

8
Letter of 3 August 1911, in
Carteggi inediti
(Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 62. Reprinted in
Suo Marito
, ed. Rita Guerricchio (Florence: Giunti, 1994), 236.

Like many of Italy’s greatest modern writers, Luigi Pirandello was a Sicilian. He was born in a community called “Caos,” near Agrigento, where his father owned sulphur mines, in 1867. He studied in Rome and in Bonn. Germany, then married and settled in Rome. His wife’s life-long mental illness had a deep effect on his writing. He began his career as a poet, novelist, and short story writer, also publishing an important essay,
On Humor
, in 1908. His best-known novel is
The Late Mattia Pascal
, 1904. His earliest plays, such as
The Vise
(1912) and
Sicilian Limes
(1913), were one-act adaptations of his stories. Pirandello became best known as a dramatist, rising to international fame with the production of
Six Characters in Search of an Author
in Paris in 1923. This was followed by the success of the play many consider his greatest,
Henry IV
. Other representative plays by Pirandello include
Liolà, It is so! (If You Think So)
, and
Each in His Own Way
. These five plays were translated by Eric Bentley and published under the title
Naked Masks
in 1952.
Maschere nude (Naked Masks)
is the title given to the entire corpus of Pirandello’s plays in Italy. Pirandello received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. He died in 1936.

Mary Ann Frese Witt is Professor of French and Italian at North Carolina State University. She is the author of
Existential Prisons: Confinement in Mid-Twentieth-Century French Literature
(1985);
The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities
(1980; rev. ed. 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2001), and of the forthcoming
Aesthetic Fascism and the Search for Modern Tragedy
(2001).

Martha King is the translator of Grazia Deledda, Reeds
in the Wind
(1998); Grazia Deledda,
Cosima
(1988) and
Elias Portolu
(1995). She is also the editor of
New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction
(1989). A selection of stories by Anna Banti, with introduction, in collaboration with Carol Lazzaro-Weis, will be published in 2001 in the Modern Language Association translation series.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pirandello, Luigi, 1867-1936.

[Suo marito. English]

Her husband / by Luigi Pirandello ; translated from the Italian by Martha King and Mary Ann Frese Witt.

ISBN 0-8223-2600-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

I. King, Martha, 1928- II. Witt, Mary Ann Frese. III. Title.

PQ4835.17 S7713 2000 853’.912–dc21 00-030868