Her Side of the Story

Translated from Italian by Jill Foulston - Afterword by Elena Ferrante

De Céspedes described this novel as "the story of a great love and of a crime." She wasn't being metaphorical.

Alessandra Corteggiani looks back over her whole life — a childhood in a working-class Roman neighbourhood, a mother who was a gifted pianist and a trapped wife, the rise of fascism, the partisan resistance, a husband who believed in women's liberation right up until the point where it might have applied to her. The retrospective structure is everything: Alessandra is trying to understand something that took decades to become legible.

The translation history is part of the book's story. An English edition appeared in 1952 under the title Best of Husbands — heavily abridged, substantially altered. Jill Foulston's 2023 translation restores the novel in full for the first time: longer, stranger, and considerably more unsparing. Elena Ferrante, who wrote the afterword, has been forthcoming about de Céspedes's influence on her own work. You can see it clearly here.