Italian novelist Dacia Maraini coming to Wheaton

The internationally acclaimed Italian novelist Dacia Maraini will talk about her life and work in a public lecture at Wheaton on Thursday, Nov. 15.

The lecture, Writing as a Woman in Italy, will begin at 6 p.m. in the Holman Room in Mary Lyon Hall. The event, sponsored by PRESCHO and the college's Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies, is free and open to the public.

Maraini is considered one of Italy's leading literary and cultural figures. She is the author of more than a dozen novels as well as numerous plays and screenplays, books of poetry, nonfiction articles, biographies and essays on literary criticism. Her work is noted in part for the artful ways in which it articulates feminist and progressive views.

While Maraini's plays and novels have won many prestigious Italian prizes, the novel perhaps best known in the U.S. is the one that won her the most critical acclaim in Italy: The Silent Duchess (La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa 1990). This novel is the fictional account of one of Maraini's own aristocratic Sicilian ancestors, on her mother's side. Set in a carefully researched Sicilian 18th century, the story follows its title character from childhood through marriage at thirteen to childbirth, a late sexual awakening, and the freedoms of widowhood.

Maraini comes from a family of writers, including her paternal English-Polish grandmother, Yoi Crosse; her father, Fosco Maraini, a well-known Japanese ethnographer, and her sister, Toni Maraini. Thanks to her father's profession and her parents' anti-fascist stance, Maraini spent several years with her family in a concentration camp for anti-fascists in Japan in the early 1940's.