Public History, Private Stories

In this important volume, Graziella Parati examines the ways in which Italian women writers articulate their identities through autobiography—a public act that is also the creation of a private life. Considering autobiographical writings by five women writers from the seventeenth century to the present, Parati draws important connections between self-writing and the debate over women’s roles, both traditional and transgressive. Parati considers the first prose autobiography written by an Italian