Their Other Side: Six American Women and the Lure of Italy

by Helen Barolini

“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.

448 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2006

About the author

Helen Barolini was born and raised in Syracuse, NY and attended local schools. She attended Wells College,graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University and received a Master's degree from Columbia University. She was an exchange student at the University of London where she studied contemporary English literature, and then traveled in Europe writing "Letters from Abroad" for the Syracuse Herald Journal. Following studies in Italy, she married the late Italian author and journalist Antonio Barolini.

In their married life of several moves between Italy and the United States, Helen Barolini became the English translator of Antonio's writings that were published in The New Yorker, Reporter and other American publications.

Given the intercultural themes of her work linking her American birth and education with her ancestral Italy, Helen Barolini has participated in international conferences and her work has been the subject of many student theses both here and abroad.

She has been honored by MELUS, the Hudson Valley Writers Center and other organizations for her literary work.

Reviews

[Lorraine Tosiello · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well conceived and researched work, detailing six American women who were lured by Italy, either to fight for it's independence (Margaret Fuller), to poetically capture it's magic (Emily Dickinson), to adopt it as her literatary birthright (Woolson), to fashion her own social and cultural paradise (Luhan), to support it's young writers and put Italy in the avant guard of literature after the First World War (Caetani), or to survive through the Second World War, protecting her home and neighbors and displaced authors, while writing biographies of Italians, through the eyes of an American heiress (Ortigo). I learned a lot, even about Fuller and Dickinson, who I have studied quite a bit. The writing is elegant and the research is prodigious.

[Dena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book, she focuses on female writers, artists, editors/patrons, humanitarians obsessed with Italy, some only in their imaginations and some that lived there. From the more well known Emily Dickinson to the more obscure Constance Woolson (a relative of James Fennimore Cooper), Mabel Dodge Luhan, Marguerite Caetani, and Iris Origo. Very interesting to me was Constance Woolson, who had a sort of hot/cold friendship with Henry James -- and she was a writer herself apart from their relationship and quite a collector. Unfortunately a niece donated it all to a small college in Florida (Rollins), which allowed the small house it was housed in and most of the collection to be destroyed/stolen and what remains is sort of rightfully locked down. A lot of Janeites read and praise James -- but I'm seeing him and his characters differently after this book. Allegedly he based a lot of his "spinster" characters on "Connie" and think he got a lot more success because of his being a male writer than she did which was frustrating to her as well as his sometimes indifferent treatment/dismissal of her friendship/relationship. Worth a read.