Elsa Morante Biography and List of Works

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

IL GIOCO SECRETO, (1941)
LA BELLISME AVVENTURE DI CATERI DALLA TRECCIOLINA, (1941)
MENZOGNA E SORTILEGIO, (1948)
L'ISOLA DI ARTURO, (1957)
ALIBI, (1958)
LE STRAORDINARIE AVVENTURE DI CATERINA, (1959)
LO SCIALLE ANDALUSO, (1963)
IL MONDO SALVATO DAI RAGAZZINI, (1968)
LA STORIA, (1974)
ARACOELI, (1982)
PRO E CONTRO LA BOMBA ATOMICA, (1987)
OPERE, (1988)