Sibilla Aleramo was born Rina Faccio in 1876 in Alessandria, into a solidly middle-class family; her father was a scientist and her mother a housewife. Her early childhood was spent in the north of Italy, but the family moved south because of her father’s work while she was still a teenager. She described her earliest years as blissfully happy and free, but her adolescence was overshadowed by her mother’s attempted suicide as well as by her own rape by an employee of the factory managed by her father where she also worked. She married this man, in accordance with local custom and as a result of family pressure, in 1893 at the age of seventeen. Her beloved son, Walter, was born in 1895. By this point, Faccio had resigned herself to an unhappy and violent marriage, the story of which is…
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Citation: Fanning, Ursula. "Sibilla Aleramo". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 May 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12681, accessed 23 November 2024.]
