★Written by Dacia Maraini, one of the most internationally influential female writers in contemporary Italian literature. Since her debut in 1962, she has published nearly a hundred novels, plays, poems and essays, which have been translated into over 30 languages and have sold more than ten million copies worldwide. With the attitude of "turning the pen into a sword", she has long been concerned about gender violence, women's freedom, power structures and cultural differences between the East and the West, and is hailed as the "living fossil of Italian feminist literature".
★This book is the culmination of the work and study of one of the greatest voices in contemporary literature, whose writing has always placed women and their rights at the centre.

A luminous, impassioned map of the women writers who, through their books and their lives, have inhabited the heart of Dacia Maraini — changing the world with words. On sofas or in kitchens, by candlelight or on flowered meadows, women have always read — and far more than men. But their silent gaze on the page, considered harmless or, at most, in need of guidance, never inspired much fear. Let them read, generations of men have thought — as long as we control what reaches their eyes.

And so it was that for centuries home libraries held the books of the fathers — the same books Dacia Maraini devoured as a child, books that enchanted and captivated her. Until, at fifteen, driven by rebellious curiosity and the quiet temperament of someone who had traded games and beach trips for reading, she began to wonder: where were the books of the mothers? Why weren’t they in the library? Why did critics treat them with condescension?

But the mothers did exist — and soon, the girl who would become a writer saw clearly that they were as talented and original as the fathers, even if history had pushed them to the margins. This book brings their stories to light, mapping the lives and works of the indomitable women writers who have inspired Dacia Maraini: from mystics to courtesans, from disobedient nuns to revolutionaries, from 19th-century novelists to masterful short story writers, and on to 20th-century feminist theorists and Nobel Prize winners.

A journey through literary history and into the hearts of the women who used the pen as a weapon to build our freedom.

DACIA MARAINI is one of the most representative figures of Italian literarure. She’s an author of novels, stories, theatre plays, poems, and essays that have been published by Rizzoli and translated in more than twenty countries. In 1990, she won the Campiello Award with La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa and in 1999, she won the Strega Award with Buio. Her last novels are La bambina e il sognatore, Tre donne, Corpo Felice, Trio and Vita mia.