Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), influential Italian novelist, whose work explores family relationships, especially the roles of women within them, against a wider social background. Ginzburg was born Natalia Levi in Palermo, Sicily. In 1936 she married antifascist activist Leone Ginzburg, whom she had met while working at the Rome publishing company Einaudi, of which he was a founder. From 1940 to 1943 Ginzburg was with her husband in Abruzzi, a region southeast of Rome, where he was in internal exile, sent by the Italian fascist regime (1923-1943) (see Italy:The Fascist Dictatorship). Her first novel, La strada che va in città was written in Abruzzi and published under the pen name Alessandra Tournimparte in 1944, the same year that her husband was executed in Rome. The novel was translated into English under Ginzburg's own name as The Road to the City in 1949 and was republished in Italian under her own name in 1975.

After World War II (1939-1945), Ginzburg returned to Einaudi as an editor and in 1950 married Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature. From 1959 to 1962 she was in charge of the Italian Institute of Culture in London. Ginzburg was elected to the Italian Parliament as a member of a small left-wing party in 1983.

Her novels include E stato così (1947; The Dry Heart, 1949); Tutti i nostri ieri (1952; A Light for Fools, 1956); Le voci della sera (1961; Voices in the Evening, 1963); Lessico famigliare (1963; Family Sayings, 1967); and La città e la casa (1984; The City and the House, 1987).