Elsa Morante's History: A Novel, Plot and Publishing Story

Who Was Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante was born in Rome on August 18, 1912. Her mother, Irma Poggibonsi, was a schoolteacher of Jewish descent from Modena; her biological father, Francesco Lo Monaco, died by suicide in 1943, while her surname came from her registered father, the tutor Augusto Morante. She left her parents’ home at eighteen.

In 1941 she married the writer Alberto Moravia, at the church of Gesù in Rome. In the years that followed she published some of the books that would make her one of the most widely read voices of twentieth-century Italian literature: Il gioco segreto (1941), House of Liars (1948, Premio Viareggio), Arturo’s Island (1957, Premio Strega), the poetry collection Alibi (1958) and, later, The World Saved by Kids (1968) and Aracoeli (1982, Prix Médicis Étranger in 1984). She died in Rome on November 25, 1985, at the Villa Margherita clinic.

The Plot of History: A Novel

The novel follows Ida Ramundo, a widowed schoolteacher of Jewish descent, and her two sons: Nino, the elder, and Useppe, whom Ida gives birth to in 1941 after a German soldier assaults her. The story runs through Rome between 1941 and 1947, from the city’s bombing raids to life in the shelters on its outskirts, up to the postwar years: in the end both sons die, and Ida is left alone.

Readers who know the Second World War only through its military events find a different angle here: the everyday life of an ordinary family caught up in those years, away from the battles. Treccani calls History: A Novel the book most closely tied to Elsa Morante’s name, for the way it tells sweeping collective events through the lives of ordinary people. Stylistically, Treccani notes, Morante shifts between a spoken register and poetry, a dreamlike and visionary tone, while still grounding the story in concrete reality.

The book opens with two epigraphs: a line attributed to a survivor of Hiroshima, on the impossibility of consoling someone who doesn’t know why they died, and a passage from the Gospel of Luke (10:21).

A Novel Meant to Reach Everyone

Morante didn’t send History: A Novel through the usual hardback release. She published it straight in a low-cost edition, in Einaudi’s Gli Struzzi series, as volume 58, in June 1974, after roughly three years of work that had begun in 1971.

Worked example: the book’s dedication, “to the illiterate,” paired with a verse from the Gospel of Luke, wasn’t a one-off gesture. Morante also insisted on a low cover price, 2,000 lire at the time, roughly one euro in 2024, and a very large first print run, 100,000 copies: choices that all pointed the same way, a book meant to reach beyond the usual circle of committed readers.

The bet paid off commercially. In its first five months, from June to November 1974, History: A Novel sold over 600,000 copies.

A Publishing Phenomenon, Between Success and Controversy

Popular success didn’t settle the matter for critics. The novel was attacked by left-wing circles, who faulted it for pessimism and a lack of ideological perspective, while criticism also came from the right. Pier Paolo Pasolini, a personal friend of Morante’s, devoted two long articles to the book, judging some of its parts unripe, not ready for publication.

The cover of the 1974 first edition also carried the line “a scandal that has lasted ten thousand years,” later dropped from the second edition.

For Einaudi, which still keeps it in print, History: A Novel remains Elsa Morante’s most widely read novel and the one that sparked the most debate.

Readers who want to compare History: A Novel with other twentieth-century Italian novels that weave private lives into sweeping historical events can turn to the Recap on The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa, or the one on Cesare Pavese, another author working on related themes from a different angle in the same years. The theme of bearing witness to those years, told by someone who lived through them, also runs through the Recap on Primo Levi.