Elsa Morante

Italian · 1912 to 1985

Born in Rome on 18 August 1912, Elsa Morante was raised as the daughter of Irma Poggibonsi, a schoolteacher from a Jewish family in Modena, and Augusto Morante, though she discovered in adolescence that her biological father was a family neighbour, Francesco Lo Monaco. She wrote stories from early childhood with little encouragement from her parents, publishing her first collection, Il Gioco Segreto, in 1941, the year she married the novelist Alberto Moravia. During the German occupation of Italy the couple, fearing arrest because of her Jewish heritage, fled south to a village near Fondi and lived among shepherds; she would later return to Rome at great personal risk to retrieve the manuscript of her first novel. Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) won the Viareggio Prize and appeared in English as House of Liars in 1951. L'isola di Arturo (1957), the story of a boy raised in solitude on the island of Procida, won the Strega. She and Moravia separated in 1961 without ever divorcing, and her writing slowed; she destroyed much of the work composed during this period, though she selected the music for Pasolini's Gospel According to St Matthew in 1963. La storia (1974), her chronicle of Rome under Fascism, became a national bestseller after she insisted on a paperback edition, drawing furious responses from left-wing critics for what they took as anti-ideological tone. After Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a negative review of the book she broke off their friendship. Her final novel, Aracoeli, appeared in 1982. She died in Rome on 25 November 1985, aged seventy-three, after years of declining health following an attempted suicide in 1983 by jumping from her window.