| dc.description.abstract | Poor, uneducated and unexperienced girls, who could not rely on their parents and fell in love with unscrupulous adults or were sexually exploited and abandoned, often appeared in Italian literature in the first part of the twentieth century, from 1903, when Grazia Deledda’s Cenere was published, to 1936, when Paola Drigo’s Maria Zef came out. Maria Zef and a short story devoted by Drigo to the same subject (Il signor di Montreux) have an important role in the history of this genre. After explaining that role, this article focuses on the ending of Maria Zef and answers two questions that it raises: is the final choice of the main character morally legitimate? Was that choice likely or possible in the time in which the story takes places? | en_GB |
