Matilde Serao

Matilde Serao (Italian pronunciation:[maˈtildeseˈraːo]; Greek:Ματθίλδη Σεράο; 14 March 1856 – 25 July 1927) was an Italian journalist, novelist, publisher and newspaper editor. She was the first woman appointed to edit an Italian newspaper, Il Corriere di Roma and later Il Giorno. Serao was also the co-founder and editor of the Naples-based newspaper Il Mattino, and the author of several novels. She never won the Nobel Prize in Literature despite being nominated on six occasions.

Biography

Serao was born in Patras, Greece to an Italian father, Francesco Serao, and a Greek mother, Paolina Borely (or Bonelly). Her father, a journalist, had emigrated to Greece from Naples for political reasons.

In 1860, the family moved back to Italy, first to Carinola and then to Naples. Serao grew up in poverty and worked as a schoolmistress, an experience later described in the preface to her collection of short stories Leggende Napolitane (Napoletan Legends, 1881). She first gained notoriety after publishing short stories in Il Piccolo, a newspaper edited by Rocco de Zerbi. Her first novel, Fantasia (Fantasy, 1883), was well received, and Serao was hailed as an author capable of writing with sentiment and analytical subtleties.

Serao spent the years between 1880 and 1886 in Rome, where she wrote five volumes of short stories and novels, all dealing with the struggles of ordinary people, and distinguished by great accuracy of observation and depth of insight: Cuore infermo (1881), Fior di passione (1883), La conquista di Roma (1885), La Virtù di checchina (1884), and Piccole anime (1883).

In 1885 Serao and her husband, Edoardo Scarfoglio, founded Il Corriere di Roma, the first attempt to model a daily journal along the lines of the Parisian press in Italy. The paper was short-lived, and after its demise, Serao moved to Naples, where she edited Il Corriere di Napoli. In 1892, she co-founded Il Mattino with her husband, which became the most important and most widely read daily paper of southern Italy. In 1904 she helped establishing the national newspaper "Il Giorno", where she would work until her death. The high demands placed by a career in journalism and publishing did not limit Serao's literary activity; between 1890 and 1902, she wrote eight novels – Il paese di cuccagna, Il ventre di Napoli, Addio amore, All'erta sentinella, Castigo, La ballerina, Suor Giovanna della Croce and Paese di Gesù. All were praised for Serao's ability to capture the personal traits of her characters and render them with sensitive power and sympathetic breadth of spirit. Although most of Serao's novels have been translated into English, a few works are only available in Italian. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing writes in his diary that between November 1894 and early January 1895 he read three of Serao's novels, "Gli Amanti", "Cuore Infermo" and "Fantasia", in the original Italian.

Although Serao was a contributor to the Fascist women's magazine, Lidel, she would later be a signatory of the 1925 Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.[citation needed]

Serao died in 1927 in Naples.

Publications

Further reading

• Gisolfi, Anthony M. (1967). "The Dramatic Element in Matilde Serao's Little Masterpieces," Italica, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp.433–445.
• Gisolfi, Anthony M. (1968). The Essential Matilde Serao. New York: Las Americas Publishing Company.
• James, Henry (1914). In: Notes on Novelists. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp.294–313.
• Kennard, Joseph Spencer (1906). In: Italian Romance Writers. New York: Brentano's, pp.273–301.
• Russo, Teresa G. (1997). "Matilde Serao: A True Verista for the Female Character," International Social Science Review, Vol. 72, No. 3/4, pp.122–135.

Sources

• This articleincorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain:Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Serao, Matilda". Encyclopædia Britannica (11thed.). Cambridge University Press.

External links

• at the Women Film Pioneers Project
• atProject Gutenberg
• at theInternet Archive
• atLibriVox(public domain audiobooks)