Annie Vivanti

Origins and early life

Annie Vivanti was born on 7 April 1866 in London. Her father, Anselmo Vivanti, was a Mazzinian patriot of Jewish origin — the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani says so in as many words — from an old Jewish family of Mantua, the son of Elia Vivanti and Eva Norlenghi; her mother, Anna Lindau, was a German writer, and Annie figures in this directory by her documented Jewish father.

Work and career

A cosmopolitan girl raised between England, Switzerland and Italy, she burst into Italian letters at twenty-four when the aging Giosuè Carducci, the nation's poet, discovered her, fell under her spell and prefaced her first book of verse, Lirica (1890) — one of the most famous literary friendships of the age. She wrote in Italian and in English, novels of scandal and success — The Devourers, Circe, a novel on the Congo's atrocities — and was, in the years before the First World War, one of the most read women writers of Italy.

The country she had chosen turned on her: the racial laws of 1938 struck her as a Jew, and in 1941 she was confined to Arezzo. She died in Turin on 20 February 1942, months before her daughter took her own life.