Anna Maria Ortese
Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998) was an influential Italian writer known for her profound empathy towards the impoverished, a perspective shaped by her early experiences in a struggling family during World War I. Born in Rome, her life journey took her from Sicily to Libya and back to Naples, where the socio-economic challenges of her youth became recurring themes in her literary work. Ortese began her literary career at a young age, publishing her first poems and stories in respected periodicals, which established her as a significant voice in Italian literature.
Her notable works include the novel "L'iguana," which explores complex themes of class and gender inequality through allegory, and "Poveri e semplici," featuring young intellectuals navigating post-war Italy, reflecting the hope and challenges of their time. Often ahead of her contemporaries, Ortese's writings addressed vital social issues with a focus on compassion and the shared human experience. Despite initial mixed responses to her innovative ideas, she garnered critical acclaim and recognition, culminating in numerous awards and honors throughout her lifetime. Ortese's legacy endures as a visionary voice that challenged societal norms and illuminated the struggles of humanity.
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Anna Maria Ortese
Writer
- Born: June 13, 1914
- Birthplace: Rome, Italy
- Died: March 1, 1998
- Place of death: Rapallo, Italy
Biography
Anna Maria Ortese was born on June 13, 1914, in Rome, Italy. Her father, a civil servant, was a native of Sicily, where his ancestors, originally named Ortiz, had emigrated from Spain. Her mother had been born in Naples. Soon after Ortese’s birth, her father was drafted into military service. Struggling to survive, Ortese’s mother and grandmother moved the family of six children to a village near Naples, where they remained throughout World War I. Her family’s desperate circumstances aroused in Ortese a lifelong sympathy toward the poverty- stricken, a sympathy reflected in her fictional characters.
Her father returned and moved the family to Libya (then an Italian colony), where the government gave him a plot of land. The family’s situation improved, but Ortese was beset with intermittent illness and family responsibilities, which kept her from attending school regularly. In 1928, the family returned to Italy, taking up residence in a poor district of Naples. This neighborhood would become the setting for Ortese’s novel, Il porto di Toledo: Ricordi della vita irreale.
Ortese’s experience of reading authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Katherine Mansfield had convinced her that literature was her true calling. At age nineteen, she sent three poems to the prestigious La fiera letteraria, which readily published them. A year later, the same periodical published her first short story, “Pellerossa.” “Pellerossa” foreshadows what became a consistent theme in Ortese’s work: the progress of civilization can destroy nature and the human spirit, making it insatiably greedy. In one story, “Piccolo drago,” (1987), she herself is a character, expressing fear that literary success could put her on the side of might rather than right. Nevertheless, she continued her literary labor, gaining acclaim and influence until one Italian president praised her nonfiction work and she received the Saint Vincent journalism prize.
Initially, however, her forward-looking ideas made some of her work seem inaccessible to critics. For example, her first novel, L’iguana (1965; The Iguana, 1987), recounts the love between a playboy and his family’s servant girl, who looks like an iguana but harbors human feelings. Critics, at first mystified, eventually recognized the work as an allegory of class and gender inequality, with Marxist and feminist themes. Ortese’s second novel, Poveri e semplici, found much greater understanding among critics and the public. The story follows a group of young intellectuals striving to succeed in post-World War II Italy. Readers were captivated by the characters’ passionate optimism and, happily, the novel coincided with the commencement of the student protest movement—the heirs, in a sense, to the story’s characters. Related themes in Ortese’s work have included her characters’ dedication to combating human suffering and the role of a shared past and future in alleviating their misery.
Ahead of her time in articulating ideas and issues that would later become crucial in Italy and elsewhere, Ortese eventually became known as a visionary. By the time of her death in March, 1998, ample recognition had come to her, leading to many awards and prizes for both her fiction and her journalism.