11. Writers from the Italian Peninsula

This chapter reviews 11 women writers, 1776-1848, from the Italian Peninsula, ranging from poetesses to novelists, from salon hostesses to revolutionaries who died on the gallows. Italy, said the Austrian Metternich, was a geographical concept, and these women engage in a variety of ways with the idea of Italian identity – all writing, as it happens, in Italian, and thus espousing the people’s voice.