Vengeance

Abstract

The present translation refers to the work Tre donne (1891) by Bruno Sperani, the pseudonym of the writer Beatrice Speraz. Beatrice Speraz (1839–1923) was an Italian writer of Dalmatian origin whose intellectual and literary trajectory is embedded in the complex social and cultural dynamics of post-unification Italy. Orphaned in childhood, she was intellectually formed in the household of her maternal grandparents, deepening her reading of Italian and German classics, with particular interest in Leopardi, Heine, Schiller, and Goethe. From the 1860s onward, she began her career in journalism and publishing, contributing to periodicals such as La Nazione, Gazzetta Piemontese, Caffaro, Corriere della Sera, and La Perseveranza. Her literary career was primarily consolidated in Milan, a key center of economic and cultural modernization in Italy, where she was actively engaged in intellectual and artistic circles. Her fiction is marked by strong social criticism, influenced by the naturalism of Zola and Daudet, and by close attention to the psychological and symbolic mechanisms of gender oppression. In works such as L’avvocato Malipieri (1887), Il romanzo della morte (1880), Tre donne, Emma Walder (1893), and La fabbrica (1893), she articulates a powerful critique of hypocritical social structures and of the destiny imposed by the moral norms of the time. By exploring gender dynamics, she portrays the symbolic and material oppression experienced by women across social strata. She was also engaged in the feminist struggles of her time, advocating for legal reforms such as the introduction of divorce and the extension of civil rights to women.