Maris Fehrorreal name Marie Louise, French from Toulon’s grandmother Sylvia Ré, was born over a century ago, in 1905, in Ventimiglia. Writer, journalist, translator, it was there in those forty years during which Italy changed her skin and destiny. Closely observing the female dynamics of the twentieth century, she experimented on herself and told in her novels, first in 1932, at the age of 27, what it means to be a teenager, a woman between two wars, then in the sixties, when you had to be a rebel to get the attention of adults. Like many heroines of his novels: girls full of doubts, questions, without any sentimental upbringing, locked up in narrow bourgeois families, eager to be heard, to enter into life. And then when they get into it, it’s a disaster. Married twice: to the writer Guido Piovene in 1934 and in 1963 Carlo Bo, an authoritative historian of Italian literature of the twentieth century, is the founder of Iulm (University Institute of Modern Languages, the future University of Communication and Languages), Senator of Life.
Ferro Writes novels, pamphlets, essays on the French novel of the nineteenth century, the main source of inspiration for her novels, translator of Georges Simenon, Honoré de Blazac, Vicotra Hugo and Colette, from 1946 to 1948 she runs a women’s weekly femina, Alba de Cespedes and Sibilla Aleramo are on the editorial team. And then it is forgotten. Like many other Italian writers. Elliot Publishing is reprinting some of his writings.the first two novels are in the bookstore: Violence 1967 and girl in the garden 1976.
Violence
The system follows the system of many of his educational novels: the girl tells with her own eyes about conflicting relationships with her family, about her desire to escape, to be liberated, but having neither money nor education, finding solace in numbers that are far from blood relationships that can listen. In this novel, published when Italy turned 68, Antonia, almost twenty years old, coming of age at 21, experiences the abuse of an authoritarian father, Pietro, a sadist, unfaithful, taxing beyond all logic, but respected by society and neighbors .
We are far beyond patriarchy and the vaunted inferiority of women.: wives do not count, daughters must remain in their place until marriage to continue the vicious circle of victims and submissives. Only mistresses, like Marina, a wealthy 35-year-old widow, have any rights and freedoms until they become wives. In order to escape even from her mother, whom Antonia accuses of being condescending towards her father, she takes refuge with Marina and finds comfort, reciprocating, in Augusta, her poor and unmarried daughter-in-law. L’Antonia’s hatred for her father boils, swells, but never finds the strength to explode to allow her to start a new life. Until the unpredictable ending between catharsis and justice, which makes Antonia finally an adult.
The language, full of outdated adjectives and terms, has a slightly dated sound, but ends up conveying the protagonist’s inner struggle well. The best pages are those that depict the surrounding nature, except for a few moments of oblivion, stormy and violent, echoing human misfortune.
girl in the garden
Released after almost 10 years Violencehas a less determined and loaded tone than the previous one, more overtly erotic, e closer to memories. The alignment is more or less repeated: childhood and adolescence, up to 20 years old, Laura spends at the villa of her rich grandmother Leo, stingy with money and affection, because she is a burden to her parents. Father, grandmother’s son, lover of pleasure, squanders mother’s money on bankruptcy. Louise’s mother is beautiful, bloodless, submissive and unhappy, and not at all a mother, like all the bourgeois wives of Ferro.
Louise is hypersensitive, looking for her place in life and in the family, but like all teenage girls, she does not have a voice, she does not have to speak just to obey. To give her consolation, Amalia, her grandmother’s housekeeper, a third person outside the family, who, together with the journalist Daria, a neighbor in the villa and a sui generis woman (she, by the way, is also unmarried), will take care of making Louise thinking. woman and not only reasonable.
The novelty is the garden, the co-protagonist of the novel in every respect. To draw it as if we were inside, to touch it, the author mentioned the extreme western Liguria, where she was born, and the Hanbury Botanical Gardens, on Cape Mortola, in the Ventimiglia region and a few kilometers from the French border. In the depths of this garden, lush and lonely, Laura finds refuge every time she needs to escape from something, from pain, from need, every time she wants to dream. The garden is the only meeting place and correspondence with Grandma Leo, who loves plants more than people. And it is there, at the age of almost 20, that he will meet love, physical and romantic, amazing and destructive, clearly not mutual. Louise, like all women, is a failure in love.but, like all Ferro’s heroines, her kidneys fail at the end.
Source: Elle