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The dismembered body of Isolina Canuti, victim of an abortion, was found floating in the Adige River at Verona on 16 January 1900. From the first lines of her "novel," Dacia Maraini underlines the distance in time between then and now and shows how it will be bridged through recourse to records contemporary to the events: newspaper articles and legal documents.
Isolina is a novel in quotation marks, for like so much narrative today, it is made up in more or less equal parts of fact (reportage), fiction (authorial fleshing-out of those facts), and ideology (up-to-date commentary). The preface by a leading Italian feminist critic, added to this edition of a book first published...