De Céspedes worked as a journalist in the 1930s for Piccolo, Epoca, and La Stampa. In 1935, she wrote her first novel, L’Anima Degli Altri. Her fiction writing was greatly influenced by the cultural developments that led to and resulted from World War II. [5] In her writing, she instills her female characters with subjectivity. [2] In her work, there is a recurring motif of women judging the rightness or wrongness of their actions. [2] In 1935, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. Two of her novels were also banned ( Nessuno Torna Indietro (1938) and La Fuga (1940)). In 1943, she was again imprisoned for her assistance with Radio Partigiana in Bari where she was a Resistance radio personality known as Clorinda. [2] From June 1952 to the late 1958 she wrote an advice column, called Dalla parte di lei, in the magazine Epoca. [6] She wrote the screenplay for the Michelangelo Antonioni 1955 film Le Amiche. Her work was also part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics. [7]

The concept of a hidden diary, a space for recording thoughts that you weren't allowed to share publicly, resonated for those living in a repressive society. "What I really loved personally was this confessional tone," says Azizi. "This idea that you can reach a kind of emancipation by the power of words alone. For someone growing up in the repressive Islamic Republic, it was really powerful, because of all the things we couldn't do. We did live this double life." Valeria is anxious and consumed by feelings of guilt and fears that her secret diary will be discovered. Multiple times throughout her diary she shares how difficult it is for her to hide this diary and how she keeps changing where she keeps it. She yearns for a “space” that she can call her own – her bedroom is occupied by her husband who spends time listening to music or reading in his free time, her children have their own rooms and she is left to write her entries at night after everyone is asleep in constant fear of being discovered. What a marvelous book! There are so many insights that will resonate with women today. Valeria’s understanding of her family and her discontent is slowly revealed. Behind the story looms WWII, fascism, the destruction of the old world and the birth of a new. It is an exploration of love, its limits and failures, the duties that hold families together.In contrast, the lazy son Riccardo, who wants to go to Argentina, who neglects his studies, who speaks to his girlfriend in an authoritative manner, seemingly can do no wrong. When he makes an error of judgement, the parents will laugh it off. A gripping slow-burn of a book.Domestic mundanity and the impulse toward freedom combine in this critique of marriage, family and fascism . . .Valeria arrives at innumerable clear-eyed epiphanies regarding gender, class and the passage of time, many of them rather unpleasant. But one of de Céspedes' points seems to be that real liberation is never comfortable or easy — a fact which, if anything, makes that state of being all the more worth pursuing." Valerie felt guilty for buying the notebook. She records, her thoughts, feelings, and observations in her new diary but feels shame….. Alba de Céspedes y Bertini (March 11, 1911 in Rome, Italy – November 14, 1997 in Paris, France) was a Cuban-Italian writer. Valeria enjoys her work, which brings great satisfaction. She realizes that her boss has feelings for her, and they begin to meet, first at the office on Saturdays, then at cafes or driving in his car. They are both lonely and feel invisible to their families. Valeria is Mama to her husband, no longer ‘wife.’ She is Bebe to her mother. To her boss, she is indispensable.

a b "Fuori dagli schemi: Vite da romanzo di grandi scrittrici" (PDF). Biblioteca N. Ginzburg. 8 March 2012. The war left her chastened but determined to live and to write. She became a major player in the Italian literary scene, publishing a series of novels chronicling this period of social change on an intimate, personal scale. She also edited a journal called Mercurio where she published the giants of Italian neorealism, and wrote an agony aunt column for the popular magazine Epoca. Here she achieved the astonishing feat of gaining enormous popular success and the esteem of the highest-minded writers of her day. At one point Sartre wanted to publish the columns as a book in France and write a preface himself. What she did – here and in her novels – was to combine intimate revelation about women’s bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within women’s lives. Valeria’s mother’s house is filled with large family portraits. Valeria will inherit them, but they are too big for her modest apartment. As her mother tells her how to treat the frames, she knows she can’t keep them. “It began in wartime,” she thinks, “suddenly you could die and things had no importance compared to the lives of human persons…The past no longer served to protect us, and we had no certainty about the future.” Her mother belongs to the old world, and her daughter the new world.The voice seizes our attention at once: forceful, clear and morally engaged . . .It’s political in a wider sense, examining a form of suppression that women recognize as global: the suppression of their thoughts." In her diary de Céspedes confides, “I will never be a great writer.” Here I take her to task for not knowing something about herself—for she was a great writer, a subversive writer, a writer censored by fascists, a writer who refused to take part in literary prizes, a writer ahead of her time. In my view, she is one of Italy’s most cosmopolitan, incendiary, insightful, and overlooked.” This, like much of Valeria’s life, will ring uncomfortably true to 21st-century readers in the Global North—particularly working mothers. Half a century before books like Women Who Do Too Much (1992) appeared, Valeria works until 7:00 p.m. before pulling a second shift of labor at home, which she comes to realize her family takes for granted: “It’s terrible to think that I sacrificed my entire self to beautifully perform tasks that they consider obvious, natural.” She also embodies the conflicts and tensions of the sandwich generation, dutifully attending to both her mother and her adult children yet emotionally and ideologically torn between her mother’s traditional values and the alarming new freedoms her daughter Mirella claims. “Maybe that’s why I often feel that I have no substance,” she reflects, wondering if her whole life functions as simply a “bridge” between their irreconcilable worlds: “Maybe I am only this passage, this clash.” Her bourgeois middle-class life gradually comes to light, tearing the fragility of her family apart. She criticizes and judges her daughter's behaviour, Mirella is almost finished her law degree and decides to start working part time for a prominent lawyer, she is seeing an older, successful and sophisticated man - she is not yet 21 - still a minor, and treated as such by her mother - yet in the notebook, she admires the independence she is developing, the confidence and assurity she exhibits.

The book takes the form of a series of diary entries made by 43-year-old Valeria Cossati in Rome in 1950. She is a wife to Michele and a mother of two grown-up children, Mirella and Riccardo. Somewhat unusually for her generation, she also has an office job. De Céspedes deftly charts the widening gap between Valeria’s increasingly desperate inner life and the roles she feels forced to play in a feminist novel that consistently calls into question the ways its narrator makes sense of her claustrophobic domestic world. A wrenching, sardonic depiction of a woman caught in a social trap.” At night, when we sit at the table together, we seem transparent and loyal, without intrigues, but I know now that none of us show what we truly are, we hide, we all camouflage ourselves, out of shame or spite.Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (translated by Ann Goldstein ) has just been reissued by Pushkin Press. This is a hugely welcome reprint and new translation of a book originally published in Italian in 1952. Structured as a day-by-day diary, it records the gradual awakening of 43 year old Valeria to her discontents as a woman in a patriarchal society. That's nothing new or novel, of course, but the intimacy, the detail and the specificity of the post-war Roman setting as well as the fluent writing had me completely gripped. Ellen Nerenberg (1994). Rinaldina Russell (ed.). Italian women writers: a bio-bibliographical sourcebook. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0313283475. The voice seizes our attention at once: forceful, clear and morally engaged . . .It’s political in a wider sense, examining a form of suppression that women recognize as global: the suppression of their thoughts.”

The absorbing and abidingly resonant confession of a woman's desire to do that most elusive thing: forge a self apart from her caring for others. Forbidden Notebook can also be read as an allegory of fascism, a post-Roe cautionary tale, and corroboration of the revelatory and exhilarating but also implosive power of honest words." Mirella disapprova questo mio sentimento, lo so bene: forse lo disprezza addirittura e, col suo modo di essere, intende fare una rivoluzione contro di me. Non capisce che sono stata proprio io a renderla libera, io con la mia vita dilaniata tra vecchie tradizioni rassicuranti e il richiamo di esigenze nuove. È toccato a me. Sono il ponte del quale lei ha approfittato, come di tutto approfittano i giovani: crudelmente, senza nemmeno avvedersi di prendere, senza darne atto. Adesso posso anche crollare.” But she chose the seemingly small scope of one woman’s interior world—her reflections upon her crowded apartment, her troublesome family, her ordinary office job—and chose to publish the novel in a venue that reached a broad popular audience. She deliberately used the vehicle of the domestic novel to explore issues of class, gender, and war. Her husband was somewhat of a pill—and less interesting to me (in relation to Valerie)….but the wisdom about her daughter especially in relationship to herself was brilliant and insightful. Her son was dominating a screwy mind in my opinion — but I found his thinking to leave the country to work in Argentina while he expected his mother to love his girlfriend- have her move in ( while he was away)….. and while his mom was at it, iron his pants > all very humorous.A lost feminist classic to rival Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique." Die kleinen, alltäglichen Nichtigkeiten wahrzunehmen, heißt vielleicht, der Bedeutung des Lebens auf den Grund zu gehen.“ (S. 38)