The first international Visitor to the WWR Program in October 2003, Professor Crisafulli is Director of the Centre for Studies in Romanticism at the University of Bologna and lead researcher of an international research project on European Women's Drama of the Romantic Age, funded by the European Community.

PD: What are the major interests in your research?

LMC: Romanticism is the area in which I have been working, researching and publishing for the last twenty years. I could define myself as a Shelleyan. In fact, the focus of my research has certainly been on P.B. Shelley and, in part, the circle of the Shelleys, including William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; their writing interconnects. But more recently, I have turned my attention to women Romantic writers and, in particular, women poets, and most recently, women playwrights. I run a centre for women Romantic poets and a journal, which I edit; they are both interdisciplinary. So we have other scholars involved all the time, in fact; our scholars come from different areas, disciplinary areas, such as philosophy, history, French literature, Italian literature, German literature and, of course, music. We have some brilliant, really brilliant, scholars in music and art history. So we are quite a large group.

PD: Is it a network?

LMC: It is a network, and it is not. It is a network in a sense that we have involved other universities - the University of Florence, of Rome, of Parma - but we have also involved British, French, American, and Canadian universities.

PD: Spanish?

LMC: No, not Spanish yet, unfortunately.

PD: But you're working on it!

LMC: Yes. So, that is our network. There is also a group based at the University of Bologna where I teach, where I work, and, so, let's say that this group is really Bolognese.

PD: We usually associate "Bolognese" with a sauce!

LMC: Exactly, exactly! Ragu, no? We have a lovely, really committed group of Bolognese scholars. In Italy we are expected to apply for government or university support and financial support.

PD: Indeed. Research Grants.

LMC: Exactly, research grants. We have been extremely successful. We have so many books and volumes and transactions coming out, and our younger, very productive colleagues do work with us closely. Beyond these colleagues we have involved many students, many postgraduates, many colleagues, from different areas, and on many themes.

PD: So it's actually teams on themes.

LMC: Exactly. Exactly. Well, we have several; I'm not going into all of that. You know, in twenty years, you can imagine. But let's say if we talk about the last five or six years. We have addressed women Romantic poets, European women Romantic poets. We've been working on women writing in Europe. As a matter of fact our most recent book is due out in a week or two. It's a fascinating look at women's letters, at how women corresponded in Europe, within Europe.

PD: And obviously in different languages.

LMC: Absolutely. Different languages, on different topics. In fact, the book is divided in different sections, and each chapter has a theme, a title, a brief biography, also bibliography, and then, a discussion of the aesthetics or theory that she may have elaborated.

PD: Now, is it largely in Italian or entirely in Italian?

LMC: We have the original text and then we havetranslation into Italian. So you have the original German, English, French, or even Spanish, but on the other hand, you have Italian translation. We have done books on education, how women were educated, and how women were writing or re-writing conduct books, and circulating their own work We have also done collections of critical essays on women, in this case, women Romantic poets. We have published books on Jane Austen; very recently we have published a book, an essay collection edited by our colleagues, Beatrice Battaglia and Diego Saglia, entitled Jane Austen: Now and Then. And then, we have published a very complete and really intriguing volume - two volumes, in fact - of women Romantic poets. It is a two-volume anthology of women Romantic poets, and it's rather complete, and even in comparison with other publications in Britain or the U.S. Certainly it is one of the more, one of the most complete, in terms of the selection of women and the range of work that has been selected and translated and the bibliographies. Okay! So, now we have finished that, but you never finish something. And now we have turned our attention to theatre and drama.

PD: And that's what you talked about yesterday at the university. What particular appeal did the stage have for women in the eighteenth century? Do you think that the stage itself was a venue that was liberating or inhibiting for women?

LMC: This is a very good question. I think that the stage was very challenging for women. As I was trying to demonstrate two days ago in my talk, for women the stage was a trial, in the sense they were very much aware of the risks they were undertaking, in terms of their reputation, since the stage was a public space. So for women of the eighteenth century, and even more so for women of the nineteenth century, to be an actress or a playwright meant to be a public person, which meant also to challenge the role of the proper lady which middle-class women were supposed to maintain. And so, to work either for the stage or on the stage or behind it meant to risk transgressing the expectations of the proper lady.

PD: Well, it was exposure of some kind.

LMC: Absolutely. The stage also posed the risk of criticism and of censorship. You see theatre has a tradition of being seen as a male domain, as an art. Men had controlled and were able to control this art from which women had to be removed.

PD: Banished.

LMC: Exactly. Banished. And so, you know, in a way, to write for the theatre meant also to challenge a long tradition of male domination and domain, and, of course, production. On the other hand, women wanted to do that, wanted to be there, wanted to write for the theatre. Why? This has very much to do with the theory of Romanticism as such, you know, the need of the Romantics - despite all restrictions, despite the fact that the Romantics are always being seen as being closed or imprisoned in their ivory tower - to communicate. They needed to communicate, to reach an audience, to reach a reader, to reach their mind, to reach their behaviour, to be able - I don't want to say to shape but I'm certainly going to say it - to shape it and to give it a new meaning, a new purpose, a new aim.

PD: And they also felt the need to communicate in the language of the people.

LMC: Exactly.

PD: To communicate in a way that would be understood.

LMC: Absolutely, because theatre and drama needed a mimetic language, a realistic language, the language of reality and also the life of the people themselves.

PD: A reflection of the mind.

LMC: Absolutely. And so women, just like men of the time, wanted to take part in this great event, which meant these mass media, this great shift in media and this need to reflect a changing reality, to shape society and give a different opportunity, especially for women. This was particularly true for women because they were deprived of legal rights. They couldn't appear in courts independently. They couldn't present their case in front of a magistrate. They didn't even have the rights to their own intellectual work. It's sad but they could not receive, as we say today, the income derived from their publication. It wouldn't go straight into their hands because they needed somebody to represent them: a husband, father, or brother. Let's think about Charlotte Smith. For her entire life Charlotte Smith was protesting against this, against the fact that she couldn't claim her rights, in public, in the court. Even when she had been divorced, for a long time, she still needed her exhusband to represent her to collect her money from publishing. So, anyway, more than anybody else, women wanted to make their voice heard, to make their pleas, to shape an ideal woman, to shape a new woman. It's perfectly true that Ibsen with Doll's House started a bourgeois theatre, a bourgeois comedy, and opened the way to the new woman. Well, I say, "Yes! But isn't that only what the canon says?" Why don't we go back?

PD: Peel back the layers, and see what happened before that.

LMC: Exactly, especially as far as women writers are concerned. Especially as women playwrights are concerned.

PD: With the medium of the stage, it's significant, I think, to realize that Romantic women playwrights were writing for a public, not a private, stage. It was no longer closet drama. It was public drama, and I think that's a major difference from an earlier period. Could you comment on the different cases you have discovered? Let's compare, for instance, the experiences of the stage of Joanna Baillie and Frances Burney.

LMC: I think that maybe we can see this problem, or this question, from two perspectives. One is how somebody who was successful, as Joanna Baillie was, had, at a certain point, to withdraw. Joanna Baillie, like many other women writers, like Barbauld, for instance, had to give up their writing because of their sex. Because they were publishing so successfully, critics started wondering if it was right for them to be doing so. Joanna Baillie, despite the fact that she was successful, did decide to withdraw because she couldn't stand attacks or criticism any longer. But Joanna Baillie was one of the lucky ones in the sense that, at least for some years, she could not just write plays but also see them staged. And this was thanks, I must say, to the support of some great authorities of the time, in particular Walter Scott. Now, Walter Scott recognized Joanna's potential and used her intellectual production, her theatrical work, because, as you know, Scott was very much concerned with the Scottish Renaissance and with the creation of a national theatre, a Scottish national theatre, which he considered absolutely essential in order to shape a national identity. Theatre has long been viewviewed as the platform of a national identity. This idea was the basis of Yeats' plans for Ireland. And in Australia, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was also a great concern to create an Australian identity through a national theatre. Okay. Now, what Scott knew, being a genius, was that Joanna, being Scottish herself - although she had lived in London for a long time - could produce this kind of national drama. And she did it! So she wrote The Family Legend for this purpose.

PD: It was commissioned, actually, wasn't it?

LMC: Oh, yes, Scott commissioned it! The play was extraordinarily successful: it was produced in Edinburgh and the audiences of the time really responded positively. Now, on the other hand, with Fanny Burney, we have only recently discovered the volume of material she wrote for the theatre. We now realize how much she wrote for the theatre, and how involved in the interests of the theatre she was. But we don't know her as a playwright. We know her as a novelist. A great novelist. Now, we know too, that she was prevented from becoming the great playwright which she certainly could have become, based on our reading of her plays today. And the reason why she was prevented was exactly because her family - her father was Dr. Burney - was extremely well known in polite society, especially at the court. So for a young lady to write for what was judged to be a disreputable venue was simply an impossibility. She was prevented; in fact, her father forbade Fanny Burney to publish. She had offers from publishers, but her father did actually intervene to stop them. There are many others like Burney, many others. I'm convinced that Jane Austen could have been a fantastic playwright. When Austen was young, her whole family was staging plays.

PD: Maria Edgeworth wrote plays, too.

LMC: Yes. But duty calling is one perspective; the point is that some women, talented women as we know, many of whom became outstanding novelists, were prevented from writing for the public, commercial theatre. The other perspective which I alluded to earlier is the fact that, within theatre, within the drama itself, we expect a comedy of manners from the woman writer. We tend not to anticipate a serious commitment towards society or a serious, shall we say, elaboration of either a theory of aesthetics or an aesthetic. In fact, however, women who challenged these conventions went straight into a fantastic competition with men in all the genres, in all the dramatic genres. They wrote tragedies as well as comedies, as well as farce, melodramas, and so on. An incredible number of women wrote what is called history plays. Now, if you deal with history, it is inevitable that you deal with ideology, that you deal with how the contemporary social situation came about, how women have been...

PD: Constructed?

LMC: Well, constructed. Yes! Yes! Well-constructed, and how they were obliged to play their role. So there is a question of genre, there is a question of gender, there is a question of classes, of social classes. To deal with a history play, to produce a history play, means that you need to be concerned with all this, you know, which was quite challenging and dangerous for them. And they did it. They did it! They used time and space in a very clever way. They used Spain and Italy or Greece instead of England, but that was done by Shakespeare, too. And they used medieval life and history, or Renaissance, rather than later - eighteenth or early nineteenth century - and so they used displacement. But they needed to be able to speak, to be able to access ...

PD: And in most successful cases, they also needed and, sometimes received, support, encouragement, and mentoring from male figures.

LMC: Yes.

PD: I'm thinking of Garrick and Scott. For all of the use that they made of these women, because they were strategists, too, they also helped several women, didn't they?

LMC: Yes, I agree entirely. David Garrick was tremendously good and generous to his women but, as you said, that was often because he understood how good they were and how successful.

PD: They were marketable commodities.

LMC: Exactly. Now, I know that you have recently published a good book on Hannah More. I think this is fantastic because there are so few books on her and but she was so relevant, so important at that time, a different era. I went to your Special Collections Library yesterday, and I picked out Percy, the tragedy which Garrick, in fact, supported very much. Hannah More is the author; she is responsible for the work but it was first published anonymously. There is a very good introduction by Garrick, who praises and introduces the playwright, but discloses no name. So we don't know the name.

PD: Actually, it's curious; More favoured anonymous publication. Her first work was a play for school girls, Search After Happiness, published anonymously. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, which went through many editions in the first nine months, was originally published anonymously. Everybody knew who did it immediately, because it had Hannah More's intellectual trademark all over it. But, she preferred - or maybe she realized the strategy or decorum of - anonymous publication.

LMC: Yes. And anonymity is a female case. Anonymity throughout history, traditionally speaking, is certainly something that, unfortunately, characterizes women's writing. They had to draw apart a curtain. And they did it too - Joanna Baillie herself, Mary Russell Mitford and many other women. Only when they actually were successful did they feel that they could come forward, and then they did it. So, it's certainly a case of difficulty and of censorship, censorship in history, in the canon. I just wanted to tell you another impressive thing, going back to your comment earlier about how men supported women. Thomas Betterton was another good supporter - of Aphra Behn. Garrick was supportive of at least sixteen or seventeen women playwrights of the time. You named Hannah More, but then we have Charlotte Lennox, Hannah Cowley, and many others. I think that also, if we move away from theatres and think about other genres, we can see different kinds of support. Let's just consider how much P.B. Shelley and Mary Shelley did collaborate. They revised each other's work and advised one another; it was beautiful the way in which they supported each other in the full conviction of the genius of the other. There's also Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In a clumsy way Godwin actually tried to revive Wollstonecraft's memory after her death.

PD: and to publish her work.

LMC: Yes. So actually there are cases where collaboration between women and men worked.

PD: It was supportive, nurturing, successful. I know we don't have a lot of time left, but in the minutes that we do, I want to ask you about your own reading. As you know, this project that Gary and I are engaged in involves investigating the connections between writing and reading for women in the present and the past, for women in our historical situation and in other times and places - across many geographical boundaries. I realize we could talk endlessly about eighteenth-century women, but let's speak about you right now. What are you reading? What kind of material excites you?

LMC: I don't know if you find this, but when you are very much committed to your research and your work, you keep on doing it - in and out of the university, at home and in the underground. So I must confess that I spend most of my time reading women's plays. It may seem a bit limited in a way. Or perhaps an obsession. But it is! It is an obsession! I want to know more, to understand more. I'm reading Mitford, Hemans, Cowley, Centlivre. In terms of other sorts of reading, if not the material I'm reading now, my life has been somehow structured around books and reading. I can't forget two books by Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. When I first read them I was pretty young, but at that time everything had to be known about sex. They gave me a sort of entrŽe, an introduction to the topic.

PD: Did you find them shocking? Or sexist?

LMC: Shocking but fascinating. I couldn't stop reading. His way of making things physical, and tangible I found utterly amazing. But then moving on, I was very much influenced by Garcia Marquez. Hundred Years of Solitude was another way of opening up my imagination.

PD: What specifically did you carry away from Marquez? Was it the huge sweep of the historiographical imagination?

LMC: Well, it was the lightness. The prose floated in the air. Exactly the opposite to Henry Miller! As much as Miller made me see and feel and visualize and smell life, the physical body and physical relationships, with the same energy Marquez made me dream. I was able to fly into a huge created universe of colours, fantasy, magic and language. I think that I learned - without having his ability - the power and magic spell that a word can have. How one can produce another world.

PD: Worlds within worlds within worlds!

LMC: Exactly! Bubbles of colour surround you. You start flying with them. It's just magic! This was something that really affected me. Another important book when I was a student, in my twenties, was by an Italian, Gesualdo Bufalino. He may not be as well known as Calvino. Italo Calvino was another one who, together with Garcia Marquez, really opened up this magic world of fiction and language and fantasy. But back to Bufalino. His book, Diceria dell'untore, was translated as The Plague-Spreader's Tale. What I was absolutely fascinated by was the fact that Bufalino used language in such a sophisticated way. He weighed words. Each word is a gem. Each word is so rich in itself, is self-contained

PD: Is it minimalist, spare writing?

LMC: I may be giving you that impression, but it's exactly the opposite - extremely rich narration, almost a flowering of words. He used words in Italian that I had never encountered before or that I had forgotten. He re-pristinated - do you say that? - made fresh, recovered a language, expressions, words that had been left behind.

PD: I rather like re-pristinated! It captures the sense precisely.

LMC: Yet within this quite elaborate, rich and decorated sentence, each word has its own relevance, its own importance. It was research of linguistic beauty. It was a celebration of words, without forgetting the kind of human understanding and depth and awareness. Bufalino in this book is very tragic, very dramatic. It's about a young man who is very ill and must go to a hospital. But the richness of the way his imagination and life, despite his body being shrunken and becoming less and less powerful, expanded and became richer was very compelling

PD: It reminds me of the way Michael Ondaatje's figure in The English Patient ruminates.

LMC: Oh yes! By the way, Ondaatje is one of the authors whom I read in the past, relating to my interests in Canadian, Australian, and postcolonial literatures. Ondaatje is one of the great inventors of magic words and worlds. I find that these authors who are so skilled in shaping the language are not just artists because they are writers, but they are multi-media creators; they join together music, painting, the bearable word, body language. So they are able to sum up the beauty in our being human and alive.

PD: Do you think it's significant that the authors you've mentioned so far as being influential in your development as a reader and a scholar have been men?

LMC: I think you're right. But Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro have given me great pleasure, too. They are in my blood, in the way I'm made. I also read widely in Virginia Woolf. If we want to speak about magic, well, Virginia Woolf tells you a lot. I'm thinking especially of The Waves.

PD: Yes, the unfolding of the day in the interchapters and the stories of six individuals that intersect and weave their way through the novel.

LMC: And the voices which become instruments - piano, pianoforte, violin. The change of colours to the moods and times of day. The tragedy of living.

PD: Do you think you've always been a reader? Did you like reading as a child? Do you remember your first experience of reading?

LMC: Yes. I had a father who was an academic. He believed very strongly that his four children should read, should get into books and into the pleasure of words at a very young age. I remember on Sunday going with him to the newsagent and his saying, "go on, now, select what you want. Don't be afraid." I collected what I wanted, usually a pile of cartoons, magazines for children, and yes Superman and Superwoman.

PD: And nothing was kept from you or censored?

LMC: No, that comes at another stage! I didn't have any pressure in terms of what to read or what not to read. Until I was about twelve or thirteen and I started to read I guess you would call them paperback romances. We called them fotoromanze. At that time there were two very popular fotoromanze called Sonio, that's Dream, and Bolero. They had beautiful pictures, photographs of young men and women hugging and kissing. Nothing really scandalous. Everything was so proper. The dialogue and story concerned courtship.

PD: Popular romance.

LMC: Exactly. At that time Italians were very very poor, very basic. And so were these books. Nothing in these stories was enriching. And so my brother, who was eight years older, finding me with these fotoromanze, was extremely angry, so angry that he slapped me. This was only the second slap of my life; the first was from my parents and was absolutely justified. The second was from my brother. He told me I couldn't get into this "rubbish." He went on: "At a time when you are shaping yourself as a woman, do you want to become a stupid creature?" He reported to my dad, who usually never got furious but was always calm, balanced, temperate, and genteel. My father simply forbade the magazines to come into the house. "You have had your experience," he said, "but from now on these publications will not be read in this house." I must admit that I did betray his trust a couple of times.

PD: You went underground!

LMC: Yes. As boys do in their bedroom or the bathroom, I did transgress a couple of times after that. But then I stopped. Not because I was afraid of being caught. In any case my father would never be stern. He wasn't a disciplinarian. He was somebody who liked to talk, to talk about ideas. We solved any problem through talking. But I started to look at this literature or pulp fiction through their eyes. I realized that the style of these books was rather limited. So I gave them up.

PD: Did you agree with their judgement that it was rubbish?

LMC: Well, not exactly rubbish, because it was still fun. In terms of how my language could be enriched and be more articulate, I started doing a sort of - how do you say, an analysis of how many times a word is used?

PD: A word frequency list.

LMC: Yes, a word frequency list. And I found they were always using the same words, very simple, the same structure and sentence length.

PD: So from the point of view of syntax and language you found them pretty minimal.

LMC: Yes, very minimal. Still, very handsome men! They were the same as movie and popular TV stars. They weren't unknown to me. But the one reason why I liked to read this stuff for a while, not for a very long time, was because I recognized those actors and actresses.

PD: You mentioned Henry Miller as one of your early influences. How do the fotoromanze and Miller connect?

LMC: Oh, they do connect. Being in Italy, being a Catholic, being brought up in a sort of bourgeois family, and being also the eldest daughter, I wasn't allowed much freedom. I don't want to put this wrong. I had lots of freedom in terms of intellectual choices and opportunities. I could go to theatres, to concerts, to the schools I wanted; I could go abroad. But in some ways my head was cut off from my body. My body was female; it had to be forgotten somehow, left behind, or taken care of. The head had to be developed. This could also justify the fact that many of the readings or stories I remember as a child were boys' stories. I developed an independent outlook and also the wish to be a boy.

PD: The wish to have more freedom.

LMC: Exactly. So when I got to Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, I think something happened. I realized that body and mind come together. I also discovered how lovely, how beautiful, it is to be a woman in terms of feeling your own harmony. Your body can sense things beautifully, and can express feelings. I was undergoing a sort of transformation into young womanhood. I left my hometown and moved away to go to university. That was quite different from what women did in Italy; they used to stay at home when they were doing higher education or university. I was very much supported by my father, too, who wanted to give us the same opportunity he'd had and my brother had had. At eighteen I decided to go to another town for university. That was tremendously good for me, to be able to arrange my daily life, to decide what I was going to do each day, how I was going to feed myself, what I was going to wear, how I was going to spend my money. For a woman of my generation to be able to go away and be completely independent and responsible for your choices and intellectual pursuits was tremendous.

PD: But it was also an opportunity to test your own formation, to put into action the enlightened principles modeled for you at home.

LMC: Yes, of course. I must say I'm extremely grateful to my father for the opportunities he gave me; he put so much trust in me.

PD: Trust is essential. So we return to David Garrick, to the early enablers.

LMC: Absolutely. It's important to be backed, supported. I imagine that this is the same for everybody; all young people - men and women - need that kind of warm encouragement. But for women that is a must.

PD: Let's finish by returning to your research network. Is it pretty evenly balanced between female and male colleagues?

LMC: You know when I started my academic career the academy was a pyramid. Women were always on the lower level, the base. The higher you went, the fewer women appeared. Now I find, with great pleasure, women are more visible; the hierarchy is different. In a way it's disrupting. There are many voices. Many women are involved. So, we have many women. But, on the other hand, I think it's important to have male colleagues. It's important for my students to hear a different perspective and voice to understand some of the complexities of gender. It is true that in the humanities nowadays women tend to be in a considerable number, which is nice. I wish they were also in a large number in sciences and economics.

PD: Thank you so much for contributing to this interview.

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