By Literary Hub | Created at 2026-09-25 11:44:08 | Updated at 2026-09-25 15:04:35
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“Cross the sea,” a young Grazia Deledda wrote in a poem to Americans in 1893, “and tell everyone that the island of Sardinia is still waiting to be discovered and known.”
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On the 100th anniversary of her Nobel Prize for Literature, the powerful legacy of Deledda, like a literary apparition, is now waiting for American and the English-reading world to rediscover her works.
Hailed in the American newspapers in 1902 as the “George Sand of Sardinia”—though, George Sand never won the Nobel—Deledda’s role in Sardinian literature occupied its own realm. “Why should anyone feel doubtful about the future of fiction,” the American reviewer noted, “when young authors are rising every day, to show us the world as it appears.”
That world appeared very differently to the young woman writer in Sardinia around the turn of the 20th century. After elementary school, with the assistance of a tutor, she had published stories as a teen, much to the chagrin of her family, who saw such work as a scandalous activity for a young woman. Deledda never looked back.
Hailed in the American newspapers in 1902 as the “George Sand of Sardinia”—though, George Sand never won the Nobel—Deledda’s role in Sardinian literature occupied its own realm.
Her first novel, Fior di Sardegna (Flowers of Sardinia), appeared in 1892, at the age of twenty-one. “In the ‘stranger’s room’ of the Porru house a woman sat crying,” began Deledda’s novel, After the Divorce, questioning that “secret” in Sardinian life for women, five hundred years after Eleonora d’Arborea reigned as the de facto leader of the island. It was one of the first novels to deal with the theme of divorce, published in 1902.
She went on to write more than sixty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
In 1926, Deledda became the second woman in the world to win a Nobel laureate in literature for her “idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general,” according to the Nobel committee.
An American news story, however, noted that it was “strange” that she continued to write about Sardinia after she moved to Rome. “Sardinia holds very little interest for the world in general. It is not rich in artistic treasures as is most of Italy. Sardinia’s charm, perhaps, is its isolation; civilization has not as yet dulled it or cut it down to the standardized pattern.”
Such a dismissal of Sardinia and its ancient and modern contributions to Mediterranean and Italian literature would plague the reception of Deledda’s work for her entire life. Fellow Sardinian literary giants, like Antonio Gramsci, Emilio Lussu, Salvatore Satta and contemporary writer Michela Murgia encountered the same.
Enter the notorious D.W. Lawrence in 1921, who spent less than a week in Sardinia. Lawrence took no notes, he famously declared. From his arrival in Cagliari, a “naked town rising steep,” he and his wife took buses and trains, first to Mandas, “where there is nothing to do,” and then to Sorgono, full of “degenerate aborigines, the dirty-breasted host” and “sordid villagers,” crossed the mountains until they arrived at Nuoro, the home of Deledda, where “there is nothing to see.”
After returning to his home in Sicily, where he claimed he found himself without anything to do, Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia, which he had originally titled Sardinian Films or Sketches in Sardinia, in a few weeks. Only one draft. But Lawrence injected his novelist skills into the journey, conjuring some beautiful scenes of nature, especially in the train ride through the Gennargentu mountains, and praised the Sardinians for being “downright” and “manly.” In many respects, Sea and Sardinia served as a stage for some funny but downright obnoxious character sketches, as if Lawrence were more intent in drawing up characters for a novel.
Lawrence’s book was first excerpted in Dial magazine in the United States. The New York Times started its review in grand style: Anyone wishing to travel to Sardinia “would find no better guidebook.”
On its one hundredth anniversary in 2021, Sea and Sardinia remained the best known work on Sardinia in the English language—not Grazia Deledda.
A century later, the Nobel Laureate’s enduring legacy remains, an enigma for many perhaps, but a literary treasury deserving another read.
In that same year of 1921, Deledda published a novel (three books, actually), five years away from winning the Nobel Prize. Italian diva Eleonora Duse had already appeared in her only silent film, Cenere, in 1916, based on Deledda’s famous novel.
In writing about the life of Deledda in Nuoro, Sardinian literary critic and author Giulio Angioni referred to the conjoined role of history and memoir in her stories, her “sort of sardography.” That “sardography,” Sardinia seen through the stories of Sardinians, was the splendor awaiting discovery by outsiders like ourselves, in so many forms.
“To discover a prolific, but forgotten novelist is like stumbling upon a new species,” social critic Todd Gitlin wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1998. After his wife discovered a novel by Grazia Deledda on a lonely pile in the corner of a bookstore in New England, he searched for the rest of her works, only finding them in small and university presses. He declared it was long overdue for a “literary resurrection” of the once famous writer with the “emotional power” of her novels. In the end, he only found five of her thirty-three novels.
After her death on August 15, 1936, family members found that Deledda had literally left a carefully wrapped package in the drawer of her desk, the manuscript for Cosima, “written in ink on light-blue paper.” Cosima, which was Deledda’s middle name, recounts the life of a young woman’s struggle to become a writer in Nuoro, amid the various characters of the village and countryside.
Like Cosima, Deledda preferred to let her writing stand on its own. At the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Deledda simply accepted the award without the traditional lecture.
The main newspaper on her island, L’Unione Sarda, ran a few lines on the prize at the bottom right corner of the front page. It seemed as hesitant as her parents over Deledda’s success. Inviting her to his office in Rome, the dictator Benito Mussolini’s attempts to engage the author resulted in little attention; she simply asked him to release a friend of hers from Nuoro from prison.
And then Deledda left the building.
A century later, the Nobel Laureate’s enduring legacy remains, an enigma for many perhaps, but a literary treasury deserving another read.
