Marianna Sirca

Brought up as a servant in the austere household of an uncle, Marianna is now a woman of property. But at thirty, she knows little of life. For others in the town of Nuoro and its surrounding hill farms, Sardinia is a harsh and unforgiving place. When she meets a former companion in service, now forced into banditry to support his family, her calm existence is turned upside down. The defining moment of her life has come. Does Marianna love for Simone Sole triumph over her common sense, social convention and what is expected of her by her family? Grazia Deledda explores the layers of temptation and doubt in a novel of Sardinian life coloured with her own intimate knowledge of its beauties and dangers.

Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. The street has been renamed after her, via Grazia Deledda. She finished her formal education at 11. She published her first short story when she was 16 and her first novel, Stella D'Oriente in 1890 in a Sardinian newspaper when she was 19. Leaves Nuoro for the first time in 1899 and settles in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia where she meets the civil servant Palmiro Madesani who she marries in 1900 and they move to Rome. Grazia Deledda writes her best work between 1903-1920 and establishes an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period is set in Sardinia. Publishes Elias Portolu in 1903. La Madre is published in 1920. She wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and received it in a ceremony the following year. She dies in 1936 and is buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.