L'art de la joie

The Art of Joy (L'arte della gioia) is an monumental historical Italian novel by Goliarda Sapienza. Written over a nine-year period the novel was finished in 1976 but was rejected by Italian publishers because of its length (of 540 pages) and its portrayal of a woman unrestrained by conventional morality and traditional feminine roles. It detailed a woman’s pursuit of cultural, financial and sexual independence in early-20th-century Sicily, during which she sleeps with both men and women, commits incest and murders a nun. It was only published after Sapienza’s death with the success of its French, German and Spanish editions earning Sapienza comparisons to D.H. Lawrence and Stendhal.