The Dance of the Necklace

In The Dance of the Necklace, Grazia Deledda moves away from the countryside of her native Sardinia to create a classically modern, urban narrative. Writing in a more spare, experimental style, she uncovers the "vain anguish of our strongest passions: love, ambition, and the instinct to appear more than what we are."

A pearl necklace symbolizes the "dance" of jealousy, greed, and love, both erotic and familial, which unites and divides the three main characters: an aunt and her niece who share the same name and a young count seeking to regain his family's bartered string of pearls.

An innocent deception turns on itself to explore the nature of the double and the mask: two topoi of modernity. Like Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Annie Ernaux, Deledda delves into what it means to be a woman, alone and aging, living in a world where she is increasingly unwanted and invisible despite her lingering desires.

According to the critic Margherita Heyer-Caput, the novel is one of Deledda's "most conscious and disquieting expressions of modernity." It challenges the labels often applied to this writer and overturns established critical categories to question margin-center hierarchies applied to her work. The Dance of the Necklace is a remarkable and rare example of Deledda's modernism.

First English translation of La Danza della Collana (1924).

Introduction, notes, bibliography.

124 pages.