Maria Messina

Maria Messina (Palermo, March 14, 1887 – Pistoia, January 19, 1944) was an Italian writer. She was the aunt of the writer Annie Messina (daughter of Maria's brother Salvatore).

Biography

Maria was born in Palermo, Sicily, the daughter of school inspector Gaetano Messina and Gaetana Valenza Trajna, descendant of a baronial family of Prizzi. She grew up in Messina where she spent an isolated childhood with her parents and brothers. During adolescence, she traveled a lot through the Center and South of Italy because of her father's continual relocations, until in 1911 her family settled in Naples. Maria Messina was self-educated and was consequently encouraged by her older brother to begin the career of a writer.

When she was twenty-two she began an intense correspondence with Giovanni Verga. Between 1909 and 1921, she published a series of short stories. Thanks to Verga's support, she also had a novella published in a literary magazine, Nuova Antologia. Another one, La Mèrica, appeared in La Donna and won the Gold Medal prize.

She carried on intense correspondence with various personalities of the time, for example with the Florentine publisher Enrico Bemporad, with the Sicilian poet and critic Alessio Di Giovanni, and especially the Catanese writer Giovanni Verga. Altogether, Maria Messina produced various collections of novellas, five novels, and a selection of children's literature, which gave her notable prestige—diverse were her contributions in magazines, and of a certain worth was her article included in a 1934 anthology edited by Lina Perroni, Studi Critici su Giovanni Verga. In 1928 her last novel L'Amore Negato came out, while the multiple sclerosis that she had been diagnosed with at the age of twenty was developing complications. She died of this disease in Pistoia in 1944.

She lived for many years in Mistretta, a city in the Province of Messina, in the heart of the Nebrodi Mountains, where many of her stories are set. Her mortal remains, along with those of her mother, were transferred on April 24, 2009 to Mistretta, considered her second hometown. Maria Messina was made an "honorary citizen" of the ancient "capital" of the Nebrodi.^[1]

Writing

Messina's writing concentrates above all on Sicilian culture and, as principal themes, the isolation and oppression of young Sicilian women.^[2] Moreover, her writing is focused on the domination and submission inherent in the emotional relationships between men and women.^[2] What is more, one of her best-known novels, La Casa nel Vicolo, marked a turning point in Messina's writing, toward the use of psychological conditions.^[3] In her narration Messina depicted the oppression of women as inevitable and cyclic and, because of this, some think that she was not a feminist.^[2] Nevertheless, the women she depicted were the representation of powerful declarations of an attitude of challenge.^[4]

Reception

Maria Messina is among the basic women writers in the history of Italian literature of the early 20th century. For this reason she is counted in the research project The Women Authors of Italian Literature.^[5]

After her premature death, Maria Messina's name slowly and gradually started to become forgotten and her books started going out of print. By chance, in the very early 1980s, she was rediscovered by Leonardo Sciascia,^[6] who arranged for many of her works to be republished in prestigious publishing houses. But her comeback had an ephemeral life and, after the passing of Sciascia, the name of Maria Messina fell into a second oblivion.

Only in 2017 have her works returned to bookstores, thanks to the restoration work directed by Salvatore Asaro,^[7] the top expert on Messinese works,^[8] who, after years of interest, has arranged for her novels to be reprinted. The first fruit of this restoration was the republication of Alla Deriva in March 2017, and a preface by the writer Elena Stancanelli, followed by Le Pause della Vita and Primavera Senza Sole.

The Progetto Mistretta cultural association founded the Maria Messina Prize for literature in her honor, through its journal Il Centro Storico, in 2003.^[9]

Works

Bibliography

• Giovanni Garra Agosta (ed.), Un idillio letterario inedito verghiano: lettere inedite di Maria Messina a Giovanni Verga, Greco, Catania, 1979
• Lucio Bartolotta, Maria Messina, Il centro storico, Mistretta, 2009

External links

• News on Maria Messina
• Seventh edition of the Maria Messina Prize, 2010
• Mistrettanews, edited by Sebastiano Lo Iacono
• Literary - Maria Messina
• Bio-bibliographic profile edited by Sebastiano Lo Iacono
• Images of the writer's mortal remains returning to Mistretta, edited by Sebastiano Lo Iacono
• Giornale di Sicilia, "Una casa editrice romana rilancia Maria Messina", August 31, 2017

References