Natalia Ginzburg Biography and List of Works

One of Italy's best-regarded novelists and essayist, who has written of her unconventional family and its opposition to Fascists oppression. Ginzburg's fiction is a mixture reminiscences, observation, and inventions. As an essayist she has explored wide variety of subjects from current movies to books and art, and from pedagogy to morals.

"A un certo punto della vita, tutto quello su cui posiamo gli occhi per la prima volta ei è estraneo. Lo guardiamo da turisti con intresse ma freddamente. Appartiene agli altri."
(from La città e la casa, 1984)

Natalia Ginzburg was born in Palermo into a middle-class family, Jewish from her father's side, who was professor of anatomy, and Catholic, from her mother's side. As a result she was brought up an atheist, and this separated her from other children. The family moved in 1919 to Turin, where she grew up in a cultural milieu. She studied at the University of Turin (1935). In 1938 she married the editor and political activist Leone Ginzburg; they had three children. On account of his anti-Fascist activities they spent three years in "confinement" in a village in the Abruzzi, but went then into hiding to Rome and Florence. Leone Ginzburg was arrested again, and he died after torture in the Regina Coeli prison in 1944. After Allied Liberation Ginzburg returned to Rome.

Ginzburg started her career as a writer publishing short stories in the Florentine periodical Solaria. Ginzburg's first 'real' story, 'Un'assenza', appeared in Solaria when she was seventeen. The story centred on an unhappy, anguished individual who suffers from boredom. Ginzburg's first novella, LA STRADA CHE VA IN CITTÁ, appeared in 1942 under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparti. It was followed in 1947 by È STATO COSÌ, which depicted an unhappy marriage as his previous work. TUTTI I NOSTRI IERI (1952) focused on a family during World War II, portraying a generation that lived through Fascism, war, the German invasion, resistance, and the liberation. In LESSICO FAMIGLIARE (1963) Ginzburg recollected her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood through the words and phrases of the various members of her family.

In 1944 Ginzburg worked as an editorial consultant for Einaudi publishers in Rome and from 1945 to 1949 in Turin. In 1950 she married Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature at the university of Rome; he died in 1969. She lived from the 1950s mostly in Rome, where she worked in publishing business. From 1959 to 1961 she lived in London.

Ginzburg was elected to Italian Parliament in 1983 as independent left-wing deputy. Ginzburg has published memoirs, several dramas, essays, translations from such authors as Marcel Proust, and a biography of the poet and essayist Alessandro Manzoni, which reveals the failure of the great author as a father. - She died of cancer on October 7, 1991.

In her earliest writings Ginzburg consciously rejected any autobiographical style or elements, which she saw as characteristic of what she called 'feminine' writing. She soon discovered that it was through writing her personal experiences in a fictionalised form that she succeeded best in expressing herself. Many of her works rely on memories of her childhood and youth in Turin. Much of Ginzburg's fiction is written in the first person and constructed almost entirely of dialogue.

As an essayist Ginzburg is lyrically stoic, her style is sparse, melancholic. Her major collections were LE PICCOLE VIRTÚ (1962), MAI DEVI DOMANDARMI (1970) and VITA IMMAGIRIA (1974). In 'Il mio mestiere' (1949) she wrote: 'I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much mosquito or a flea of a winter I might be.'

For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2) Natalia Ginsburg by Allan Bullock (1991); A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature by S. Pacifici (1962) - NOTE: Natalia Ginzburg's son Carlo (1939-) is a professor of modern history at the University of Bologna. He has published books on sixteenth-century religious radicalism and witchcraft. His first major work was The Night Battles (1966). Other works include Il nicodemismo (1970), The Cheese and the Worms (1976), and The Enigma of Piero (1981)

LA STRADA CHE VA IN CITTÀ, (1942)