Annie Vivanti’s Multicultural Identity and the Shaping of the Artist’s Body

Mostly ignored in studies of nineteenth-century women writers, Annie Vivanti (1866–1942) was anything but a minor figure in the Italian fin-de-siècle literary panorama. During her forty-year career, she published enormously successful novels, as well as poetry, short stories, plays, political writing, and a travelogue. Vivanti’s artistic persona was shaped by her multicultural upbringing she skillfully used to beguile and capture multiple readerships. Her mixed heritage also enabled her to maneuver among various political commitments, including Irish independence and Italian imperialism. As a practitioner of fictional autobiography, Vivanti blurred the line between truth and fiction, challenging readers to distinguish author from narrator and/or characters. As a stylist, she crafted her own feminized idiom which contested patriarchal paradigms. As a woman, she asserted her legitimacy as a female artist with full control of her authorship.