The favourite

Championed by Elena Ferrante, Céspedes's neo-realist classic The Forbidden Notebook is being reissued 70 years after it was first published.

Valeria is an unreliable narrator, though, and we see her cowardice and need to be loved more clearly than she does, and fear for her when she embarks on a love affair with her over-romanticised boss. What she did – here and in her novels – was to combine intimate revelation about women’s bodily and emotional lives with a deep moral seriousness about the need for change within marriage as an institution and within women’s lives. “Because every time we fall in the well we descend to the deepest roots of our being human.” Is it too depressing to know the people closest to her too well? Here she achieved the astonishing feat of gaining enormous popular success and the esteem of the highest-minded writers of her day. There’s exhilaration here, but also fears that feel as though they must be Céspedes’s own: is the writer in danger of participating less when she’s analysing more? But Valeria’s diary also enables Céspedes to ask perennial questions about the value and dangers of an examined life. Here Ginzburg bemoans the “bad habit” women have of “falling into a well”, floating or even drowning in “the dark and painful waters of melancholy”. Valeria returns to her husband and almost adult children only to realise she wants to hide the notebook but has nowhere to do so: “I no longer had a drawer, or any storage space, that was still mine.” She then begins a period of secret diary writing that feels sinful but is also a vital, unstoppable source of defiant personal definition. She also edited a journal called Mercurio where she published the giants of Italian neorealism, and wrote an agony aunt column for the popular magazine Epoca. These women were famous in their lifetimes but have been forgotten since, and I think we owe their rediscovery to our own need for a reinvigorated realist novel during a moment almost as crisis-laden as Italy in the 1940s. [Rachel Cusk](https://www.theguardian.com/books/rachel-cusk) and [Sally Rooney](https://www.theguardian.com/books/sally-rooney) among them, have been crucial in championing Ginzburg.