Cosima     by Grazia Deledda, Translated by Martha King Original title: Cosima Original language: Italian Published by Italica Press Pub. Date: 1995 Format: Paperback, 153 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.49 x 8.57 x 5.77 ISBN: 0934977062 List Price: $12.50, £12.50 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £12.50 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.50 Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: UK Format: 150 pages List Price: £5.95 Not available for ordering

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Grazia Deledda was a noted writer of the 1920s from a poor corner of Sardinia and this is her only discernibly autobiographical work, where she tells the story of her childhood and youth, paying attention to interior realities as much as exterior ones. It’s a diary in the form of a novel, written in the third person and with Cosima as the narrative double for the author herself. She is the ‘serious dark-haired girl with large brown eyes and tiny hands and feet’, very prone to daydream and reverie despite the ‘restlessness of an Amazon’, and ‘passionate zeal of an adventure-story heroine’ which is her basic nature.


The book is based on two themes; one the succession of events, the struggle with the world which matures the young girl’s character — the death of her father and sister, the decline of her beloved brother Santus ‘destined for great things’ but destroyed by drink — while the other is the gradual development of her vocation as a writer. Here self-conquest develops from recognizing values beyond personal ambition and public success into an appreciation of individual strength: ‘the whole self, drawing on the mystery of one’s own inner life’.


Cosima is an exceptionally interesting record of the development of a talented woman’s artistic and human consciousness in a time and cultural climate which were not very easy for women in general.

‘Now Cosima is again in her melancholy house where after her return from the mountain everything has taken on a sadder aspect, almost a decadence, or more precisely the withered damp colour of autumn — a funereal odour of chrysanthemums.

She is cold in the high road from whose window she sees Monte — it too already covered with fog. The crows’ cry announces winter. But there are still moments for her when the sky opens wide and a springlike warmth heats her blood. She writes; bent over her scratch pad, when her sisters are looking after their mother, and Andrea is away in the country, and Santus is deep in one of his usual drunken sleeps, she throws herself into the world of her fantasies and writes, writes out of a physical need, like other adolescents run through garden paths or go to a forbidden place, and if they are able, to a rendezvous of love.’ pp77-78