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 Italian
novelist, short-story writer and poet, whose popular novel LA STORIA
(1974), a penetrating study of the impact of WW II on European culture,
has been translated into several languages. Morante was at one time
(1941-1963) married to novelist Alberto Moravia; they were later
divorced.
Elsa Morante was born in Rome, the daughter of a Sicilian father
and Emilian mother. Her formal education was incomplete, and she
left home at the age of eighteen. Morante's marriage with the writer
Alberto Moravia brought her into contact with the leading Italian
writers and intellectuals of the day. They had met in 1937 when
she was living with an older man; she took then a younger lover
and met finally Moravia. Moravia was attracted to her by her personality
and he also realized that she was a natural-born writer.
"I never fell in love with Elsa. I loved her, but I did not
manage to lose my mind, that is I was never in love."
(Moravia in Vira di Moravia, 1990)
During the last years of World War II, she lived as a refugee in
the countryside near Cassino. Later the rural world of the south
played important part in her fiction. Morante's first novel MENZOGNA
E SORTILEGIO (House of Liars) was published in 1948, and gained
critical success. It presented themes that became central in Morante's
works: the world filtered through memories, dreams and obsessions
of different generations threatened by external reality.
Morante was not a prolific writer. Her next novel, L'ISOLA DI ARTURO
(Arturo's Island), appeared nearly ten years later. In it the narrator,
Arturo, looks back at his life and goes through a painful maturation
from luminous fantasies to a new awareness. IL MONDO SALVATO DAI
RAGAZZINI, a collection of poems, popular songs, and a one-act play,
was published in 1968.
Morante's major work, La storia ( History) was set in the
Rome during and after WW II. It depicted the lives of Ida Ramundo,
an epileptic schoolteacher, and Nino, fascist who becomes a partisan.
Ida experiences all the horrors of war, and fights for the survival
with her two sons. Each of the novel's eight sections begins and
ends with a brief history of the ongoing war.
La storia as in Morante's other works, reflects a deep understanding
of the human psyche and historical awareness. Condemning the arrogant
falsifications of official history, which presents itself as a glorious
process, Morante reveals persecutions, injustices and the conflict
between 'outsiders' and institutions in society. Morante also published
essays and short stories. She died in Rome on November 25, 1985.
For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature,
ed. by Steven S. Serafin (1999, vol. 3); The Theme of Childhood
in Elsa Morante by Grace Z. Kalay (1996, paperback); 'History:
A Novel' by S. Spender, New York Review of Books, 28 April 1977:
31-34
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