Publisher's Synopsis
A collection reviews published in "Book Review Digest" - Volume 1 [1905]:
The author, a young Sardinian, has written a sad story of Italian peasant life. The hero is condemned to twenty-seven years imprisonment for the murder of his uncle. During his confinement, before the confession of the real murderer frees him and establishes his innocence, his baby dies and his pretty young wife, who lacks both money and character, secures a divorce, under the new law which liberates the wife of a convict, and marries a wealthy lover whom she had once rejected. The story is a pitiful one, and when at last the two are reunited they are saddened, disillusioned, and their young happiness is gone forever.
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"In style she is as simple and unaffected as Verga himself. She effaces herself almost wholly, she makes you see the primitive life of her little island almost as vividly as though you were there in person."
-Frederic Taber Cooper for "The Bookman"
"The translation appears competent and sympathetic."
-"The Critic"
"As a picture of peasant characteristics and modes of thought it is perfect."
-"The Independent"
"The translator has apparently preserved the color and flavor of the original. The book has a conscious moral tendency, it is, naturally, in that it is a narrative of simple Catholic people against divorce; and were it intended as a contributing pamphlet in the present cheerful international discussion, it would serve its purpose far more effectively than, for instance, M. Bourget's recent agitated tract on the same question. But the conditions here described are not representative. The young wife of a young man unjustly condemned to lifelong imprisonment for murder, discovers that there is a law granting divorce to wives of convicts, secures one, and marries an earlier suitor. All this is told with exceptional vividness, if also with unnecessary brutalities. The temperamental transitions of the selfish and unspiritual Giovanna are ruthlessly true. Then the author vigorously applies herself to picturing the retribution, a period so severe and prolonged as to exhaust the hardiest reader. The art of the book perhaps weakens as it advances. Many of its unpleasantnesses might be omitted altogether, and the final reunion of Giovanna and her first husband, the latter having been released from prison, affords a strangely false finale. The translation appears competent and sympathetic, and the service of bringing Signora Deledda's work to the notice of English readers is no mean one.
-"The Critic"