Teresa Uzeda is fifteen when we first see her waiting for her grandfather in the Florence sunlight, all restless hope and adolescent hunger. By the novel's end, she will have lived an entire life of disappointment. Federico De Roberto traces her journey from childhood through marriage, from naive romance to bitter adulthood, painting the portrait of a woman whose dreams are systematically crushed by the rigid patriarchy of Sicilian aristocracy. The man she doesn't love becomes her husband; the passion she risks everything for brings only further disillusionment. This is the novel that spawned the character who would later loom over De Roberto's masterpiece I Viceré, but it stands entirely alone as a meditation on the gap between what we imagine life will be and what it actually becomes. De Roberto writes with surgical precision about the particular cruelty of provincial Italian society, where a woman's choices are illusions themselves, where even rebellion leads to the same hollow conclusion: that all of human existence is illusion.
