Helen Barolini – författare

Spanning a quarter century of work, the essays in Helen Barolini's Chiaroscuro explore her personal search; literature as a formative influence; and the turning of the personal into the political.

Drawing on rare sources and archival material, Helen Barolini has here collected 56 works by Italian American women writers. The volume features: prose, poetry, one play and a large section of fiction.

A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America's most distinctive voices. These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer's life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini's art. Divided into three closely linked sections—"Home," "Abroad," "Return,"—the essays move through Barolini's worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There she lived for many years, becoming acquainted with the brightest of Italy's literary lights. The accomplished poet, novelist, and critic she became now lives at home in two nurturing cultures, America and Italy both.The essays are memoirs of her house on a street named for Henry James's grandfather, tales of literary journeys from Taos to Taormina, and Paris to Rome, as the young bride of a poet from the Veneto and, later on, as a distinguished writer whose explorations of identity and dislocation took her back to Italian inspirations.From a delightful account of a writing fellowship in an exquisite villa overlooking the Italian lakes to her first trip back to discover distant family roots in the hills of Calabria, Barolini moves lyrically through the generations of her life, giving form to the influences that shaped her art and her sense of self—as an American, a woman, and a gifted daughter of the two cultures she has so powerfully imagined.Praise for Helen Barolini"An impassioned and magnificent contribution to our knowledge of what it has meant and means still to be an ethnic American and woman . . . . a book of heroic recovery and affirmation."—Alice Walker (on The Dream Book)"Large in scope, in depth, and in the gift of narrative."—Cynthia Ozick (on Umbertina)

"Our lives are Swiss," Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, "So still—so cool." But over the Alps, "Italy stands the other side." For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom.So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy.Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy's mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of the great Italian diaspora. Rather, they were drawn to an idea of "Italy" and its gifts—in whose welcome a new self could be created. Or discovered.Emily Dickinson traveled to Italy only in the imaginative genius of her verse. Margaret Fuller struggled alongside her Italian lover in the political revolutions that gave birth to the Italian Republic, while the novelist and short-story writer Constance Fennimore Woolson found her home in Venice and Florence. Here, too, is the flamboyant artist Mabel Dodge Luhan, entertaining at her villa near Florence; and Marguerite Chapin of Connecticut, who married an Italian prince and in Rome founded the premier literary review of the mid-century, Botteghe Oscure. Finally, here is Iris Cutting Origo, the Anglo-American heiress who, with her Italian nobleman husband, built a Tuscan estate, where she wrote acclaimed biographies—and created a refuge from Mussolini's fascism.Linking these lives, Barolini shows, is the transforming catalyst of change in a new land. Their Other Side is a wise, warm, and deeply felt literary journey that brilliantly captures the enduring effects of Italy as a place, a culture, and an experience.

The "panoramic, descriptive, and solidly crafted" historical novel of immigration, womanhood, and the feminist ideals of self-reliance and self-confidence (Publishers Weekly). This sweeping, multi-generational novel begins in southern Italy''s Calabria region in the late 1800s, as Umbertina—the wife of a simple farmer—persuades her husband to emigrate to the United States to pursue its promise of hope and freedom for their three children. Through years of struggle on New York City''s Lower East Side and then in a growing upstate New York town, it is Umbertina''s determination, ingenuity, and business sense that propel the family into financial success and security—leaving her daughters and granddaughters free to sort out their identities both as Italian Americans and as women. "Through a dazzling interplay of American and Italian characters in both countries, Helen Barolini delineates the major concerns of all thinking American ethnics." This is no less true today, as this republication restores Umbertina to a reading public newly attuned to the complexities of cultural inheritance and identity (The Philadelphia Inquirer).