The Silent Duchess

by Dacia Maraini, Anna Camaiti-Hostert (Afterword)

Overview

An international bestseller from Italy's foremost woman writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558611948
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	01/01/1999
Edition description:	1st U.S. Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

One of Italy's foremost women writers, Dacia Maraini was a finalist for the International Man Booker prize, the winner of the international Prix Formentor and the Premio Campiello, one of Italy's highest literary honors. She is the author of more than fifty books, including novels, plays, collections of poetry, and critical essays.

Editorial Reviews

The heroine of this novel, Marianna, is a duchess in early 18th-century Sicily. She is deaf and dumb, but she wasn't born that way. As she turns 40, she realizes that she has been married (since she was 13) to the uncle who raped her when she was five years old. This traumatic revelation triggers her physical disabilities, compelling her to seek refuge in books and letters. Marianna decides to travel after her husband dies and even turns down an attractive marriage proposal in order to be independent for the first time in her life. Maraini's (e.g., Voices, Serpent's Tail, 1997) writing is elegant, and her graphic descriptions of the luxurious life of the aristocracy in sharp contrast to the squalor of the majority living in poverty are quite realistic. The Silent Duchess was made into a movie in 1996. Recommended for women's studies classes, readers interested in early Sicilian history, and wherever foreign authors are popular.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH

Library Journal

. . .[A] story of grace and endurance, not mere survival. . . .The final and greatest satisfaction of Maraini's novel is that the Duchess remains triumphantly silent. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kathryn Harrison

"The publication in America of Maraini's The Silent Duchess... is cause for rejoicing. Episodic and essentially plotless, but propelled by an inner tension, this unusual historical novel about the splendid but squalid Sicilian aristocracy of the early 18th century comes closer to belles lettres than a conventional novel." -Publishers Weekly

"[D]eftly juggles a strong feminist statement with a beautifully specific re-creation of 18th-century Sicily. . . . [A] carefully paced story of intellectual and moral growtha story thats as much a charming fairy tale as an impeccably realistic chronicle of one woman's painstaking ascension to self-expression and independence." -Kirkus

"Maraini brilliantly conveys the mixture of luxury and squalor in which the Sicilian aristocracy lived. . . . The Silent Duchess manages totally to overpower the reader with its narrative urgency. . . . Since she won the Prix Formentor in 1963, Dacia Maraini has produced nothing finer than this." -Evening Standard (London)

"This is a novel of the greatest vividness. It arouses intense feeling. It provokes thought. It invites the reader into a world which is very different from that in which we live, and yet immediately recognizable as true and valid. . . . It is illuminating, moving, and entrancing." -The Scotsman (Edinburgh)

"The Silent Duchess has a subtlety of perception, a delicacy in probing emotions and above all, an elusive feel for history itself. . . . The narrative has the richness of a saga. . . . This history of a woman's quest for dignity is an astonishing achievement." -The Independent (London)

"Dacia Maraini has produced a fiction of elegance and charm." -The Mail on Sunday (London)

"A thoughtful and beautifully written book." -Sunday Express (London)

From the Publisher