The Silent Duchess

by Dacia Maraini (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $6.05

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $3.35

  This international bestseller won the Premio Campiello prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, and more than 200,000 copies have been sold in Italy since 1990. The novel is a picture of Sicilian society which bears comparison with The Leopard. Set in Sicily in the eighteenth century, the heroine is the silent Duchess Marianna, a deaf woman born into an aristocratic family where she is trapped and burdened by its demands. Married at thirteen to her uncle, she watches three generations come and go, and finally manages to gain her own freedom. The book is rich in social history; Maraini uses the heroine's talent for close observation as a literary device resulting in tantalizing descriptive paragraphs of delicate beauty.