productivity. The lines and the novels traced by that tireless hand are more than the Alexandrines of Victor Hugo, more than the autos of Calderón. We may call them “flowers and hay,” to use Manzoni’s term; but hay—and if you don’t believe it, ask any peasant—is no less precious than flowers. It has its own fragrance, and it feeds beasts who would not touch lilies and roses. You may say that her French rival Xavier de Montépin had an equal abundance of inventive imagination. But he was a man, and a Frenchman; Carolina a woman, and an Italian.
Among the women writers of other lands the only one to whom she may fairly be compared is Ann Radcliffe, authoress of the terrible Mysteries of Udolpho—and she, though she died in 1823, is still unforgotten. Among Italians, Mastriani alone can rival the fertility of her unrestrained genius. And yet I would swear that her modern sisters in fiction regarded her with that arrogant scorn of which women alone are capable. Certainly they said that she did not know how to write or to psychologize. But how can you ask, my dear ladies, that an Italian woman should write good, pure, strong Italian prose? Since the time of Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, who wrote for her children and not for print, since the time of St. Catherine of Siena, who wrote for Paradise and not for this foolish and sinful earth, since the time of Sister Celeste
