Entrusted Memory and Self-Representation. The Archives of Twentieth-Century Italian Women Writers

This article explores how twentieth-century Italian women writers have organized, selected and preserved their personal archives as a crucial ‘place’ of selfrepresentation. Focusing on figures such as Sibilla Aleramo, Alba de Céspedes, Elsa Morante, and others, it highlights how diaries, letters, manuscripts, and editorial correspondence became spaces for negotiating identity, authorship, and cultural visibility. These archives, often meticulously curated by their creators, reflect a conscious effort to document intellectual trajectories and to reclaim a historical presence within a maledominated literary sphere. The article also underscores the philological and historiographical significance of women’s deliberate acts of entrusting their memory to an institution, thereby establishing an order for the papers that has to be respected.