Ursa Minor: Notebook Notes and Other Notes, Sibilla Aleramo, Jeanne-Hortense Alzinson

Sincerity! But if I run my hands through my hair, close my eyes, and suppress my tears, while all my passion screams at me to throw myself on the ground and struggle like a madwoman, if I instead get up, walk into the night towards the wind, towards the serene moonlight, open my eyes again above the river, then return to my lamp and force myself to remain attentive to arduous and cold work, am I sincere? What am I betraying? What am I obeying? "Ursa Minor is the secret book of Sibilla Aeramo (1876-1960), the writer whose legend, forty years after her death, continues to enthrall today's readers. A femme fatale with incomparable charisma, her beauty, intelligence, and art fascinated and dazzled everyone she met in Rome, Paris, and elsewhere—Gorki, Colette, Anatole France, D'Annunzio, Rodin, and Stefan Zweig, who after meeting her in Rome, declared upon his return to Vienna: "He who has not seen Sibilla Aleramo in Rome in this first decade of the twentieth century has seen nothing." In Ursa Minor, the author of the unforgettable novel A Woman gathers intimate reflections that deeply reveal the passions and torments of a spirit that asserts fierce independence. Her thoughts and notes taken on the fly, sometimes in the form of short stories, were composed over time and cover a period from 1901-1902 to the 1930s. Ursa Minor is the fable of Sibilla, a woman and artist imprisoned by her legend, collected in the melancholy of her solitude. Her love correspondence with the poet Dino Campana, This Journey We Called Love, is being published simultaneously in the same collection.