Summary of Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House
“Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House” by Maria Messina is a collection of short stories about poor peasants and middle-class families in Sicily in the early twentieth century. The stories depict harsh living conditions and the exodus of many Sicilian men to America in search of a better life, focusing in particular on daughters and wives who remained behind in Sicily, bound by the expectations and authority of family and community.
Reasons to read Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House
Maria Messina was an Italian writer from Sicily, best known for her novels and short stories portraying the oppression of young women within a patriarchal Sicilian society. The short story collection “Behind Closed Doors” offers a compelling insight into the lives of Sicilian women in the first decades of the twentieth century — a period when few stories were written about them, and even fewer by a woman writer. After her death in 1944, Maria Messina fell into obscurity but was rediscovered from the 1980s onwards, largely thanks to the efforts of fellow Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia (“The Day of the Owl”). Apart from “Behind Closed Doors”, her only other work currently available in English is the novella “A House in the Shadows” (La casa nel vicolo).
Setting: Sicily (Italy)
The short stories of “Behind Closed Doors” are mainly set in small inland Sicilian towns modelled on Mistretta in the Nebrodi Mountains of north-eastern Sicily, where Messina spent many years.
Original title: Casa paterna
Year of publication: 1944
Nr of pages: 210
