Grazia Deledda: 100 years since a free woman won the Nobel Prize

But Deledda’s modernity also lies in her connection with the ancestral world she had left behind. As a young woman, she had enthusiastically joined Angelo De Gubernatis’s project to collect Italia’s folkloric heritage. The modern perspective she gained through their intellectual exchange led her to adopt a liberated outlook and to recognise that women had the right to aspire to lofty ideals and ‘dreams of glory’. This new perspective also enabled her to recognise the value of rituals still practised in Sardinia that had been passed down through the millennia. In *i* *La via del male* */i*, she depicted *attitidos*, the poetic improvisations of the mourners during funeral lamentations. In Dopo il divorzio, she depicted the Argia ritual, in which seven young women, seven married women and seven widows danced in a circle around a man buried up to his neck to cure him of a tarantula bite. In The God of the Living, she described the water rituals on the eve of St John’s Day, which James G. Frazer had discussed in The Golden Bough.

The narrative draws the reader into the emotions, into the euphoria – akin to a kind of intoxication – that overwhelms the participants: the celebration of water becomes a moment of euphoria akin to intoxication; the sacred and the profane merge, giving rise to a religious sentiment in which pagan elements coexist with Christianity. The body receives its blessing from the river, from the night’s dampness, from the darkness teeming with life that the day’s scorching sun cannot overcome. It was often the women who presided over the ceremony as officiants. At the same time, archaic Sardinian society recognised a responsibility in male behaviour. In Fire in the Olive Grove, the mistress’s reply to the servant who asks her about the morality of the girl he intends to marry is significant: ‘You know that better than I do’. Only he knows whether he has treated her with respect.

The subjugation of women in Sardinia was not as absolute as in other parts of the Mediterranean. As early as the Middle Ages, the Carta de Logu of Eleonora d’Arborea had recognised women’s right to inherit and own property and to pass it on to their daughters.

Sardinian matrimonial law (‘alla sardisca’) stipulated that a wife’s assets remained hers to dispose of as she saw fit, and did not automatically pass to her husband, as was the case with the dowry. The Carta de Logu also punished rape, permitting a marriage of convenience only with the woman’s consent. In modern Europe, however, women were still subject to their husbands’ authority; they could not own property, bequeath assets, inherit property or sign legal documents. In Italia, the code of honour existed – it was only abolished in 1981 – and rape was considered a crime against morality. In the event of an extramarital pregnancy, the man was under no obligation to acknowledge paternity.

In an article published in 1893 in De Gubernatis’s journal Natura e arte, Deledda spoke of the great changes that were taking place in Sardinia too, concerning the status of women, acknowledging that there were women attending secondary school and preparing themselves for the challenges of science and the arts, women who painted, sang, played music, studied, thought and wrote. More than thirty years later, this would also become Virginia Woolf’s vision; she would urge women to write all manner of books, without hesitating over any subject. As for ‘a room of one’s own’, Grazia Deledda had already gone further: with the proceeds from her literary work she had built her villa in Rome, and with those from the Nobel Prize (10 December 1926) she had purchased Villa Caravella in Cervia.