The Mother

The Mother, originally La Madre, is a novel by Grazia Deledda, the Italian writer who lived from 1871 to 1936 and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926. The novel was first published in Italian in 1920 and has been one of Deledda’s most internationally successful works, with substantial translations into English and many other languages across the twentieth century.

Deledda was born in Nuoro in central Sardinia and produced the substantial body of her fiction with the Sardinian island as the central setting. Her novels and stories drew on the substantial traditional culture of rural Sardinia, with substantial attention to the particular religious, family, and social patterns that characterised the island’s distinctive culture and that distinguished Sardinia substantially from the mainland Italian regions that the broader Italian literary tradition had taken as its primary subject matter. Her work essentially established Sardinia as a substantial setting in modern European literature and contributed substantially to the broader Italian regional literary tradition.

The Mother takes up the substantial dramatic situation of a young Sardinian priest who has fallen in love with a young woman in the village where he serves and whose mother becomes the central conscious presence in the novel as she works to prevent the substantial scandal that the relationship would produce if it became public. The mother of the title is the priest’s mother, who has been the substantial driving force behind her son’s vocation to the priesthood and whose ambition for his religious career is now substantially threatened by his developing personal feelings.

The novel works through the substantial dramatic situation across a relatively short narrative span, with substantial psychological attention to the three central characters and to the substantial Sardinian Catholic cultural framework within which the situation develops. Deledda handles the religious and moral material with substantial seriousness and avoids the various forms of melodramatic or sentimental treatment that the substantial popular novelistic tradition would have produced from the same material.

Deledda’s prose was substantially admired in its time for its careful classical Italian style combined with substantial attention to the specifically Sardinian material that gave her work its distinctive character. The Mother is one of her most carefully constructed novels and represents her mature method at its most concentrated.

The book runs about two hundred pages in English translation and is essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century Italian literature or in the broader European regional novel tradition. It pairs naturally with Deledda’s other novels and with the substantial broader Italian regional fiction tradition.