I don’t know a lot about Evelina Cattermole, but if I had another lifetime and a generous research grant I might devote it to writing her biography. “Dramatic” doesn’t begin to describe the life of this gifted, beautiful woman. The basic elements are these:*
She was born in Florence in 1849 to a musician mother and Scottish professor of English. Her first collection of poetry was published when she was 18. She was welcomed in the home of the poet Laura Beatrice Olive, wife of Pasquale Mancini, the eighth Marquis of Fusignano, where she fell in love with the marquis’ son Francesco, an army lieutenant. She married him at age 22, and they settled down in Milan. There she frequented the salons of leading writers and thinkers of the day, while her husband demonstrated a taste for gambling and consorting with actresses.
She took a lover, and the affair was eventually betrayed to the husband by a servant. Francesco challenged the young man to a duel and killed him. After being acquitted for murder (on the pretext of defending his honor), he divorced Evelina and evicted her from their home. Her own family would not take her in (her mother had died, and her father, who had remarried, was scandalized by his daughter’s affair). She returned to Milan briefly to attend her lover’s funeral, which she witnessed from a distance, trying to remain unseen.
She moved around Europe and settled in Rome, where she gradually found critical success as a poetess, short story writer, novelist and editor, writing under the pen name “Contessa Lara.” She had affairs of varying duration. One of these, with a young painter with more financial need than talent, turned out to be fatal. When she tried to end their relationship, he turned abusive and violent. A male friend of hers gave her a pistol to defend herself with, and it was with this pistol that her ex-lover shot her. After several agonizing hours (and her lover was apparently in no hurry to get a doctor) she died; the ex, who had shot himself, survived. Before she died, she cried out to witnesses that she had been killed “soltanto per interesse”—only for money. She knew her killer might get off the hook if he could paint his crime purely as one of passion. (He didn’t entirely escape punishment, being eventually sentenced to a jail term of 11 years and 8 months.) As if all that wasn’t enough, funds collected for her burial vanished, and she was buried in a common grave.
As a literary translator, I am interested more in her artistic creations than in her fascinating life. But generally I don’t translate poetry, and I found her semi-autobiographical novel L’innamorata (Woman in Love) interesting but uninspiring.
She wrote short stories that were published in journals and eventually collected into anthologies. They are hard to find today, but one story of hers was included in an anthology of 19th-century Italian short stories, Novelle italiane, L’ottocento, edited by Gilberto Finzi and published by Garzanti Press in 1985. That story—”Il vezzo di corallo” (“The Coral Necklace”) was included in an anthology of stories by 19th century Italian women, translated into English, titled Writing to Delight (University of Toronto Press, 2006).
I haven’t read that, because after reading the marvelous story in Italian, I wanted to write my own translation without being influenced. That has been graciously published by my brother, the novelist Jonathan Eaton, in his online fiction blog Corylus Press. You can read it here, and I hope you enjoy it. And I hope that Evelina, wherever she is, approves.
*Full disclosure: everything I know about Cattermole’s life comes from the Italian Wikipedia article about her, and a brief prefatory biography provided by Gilberto Finzi in Novelle italiane, L’ottocento.
The Garden of Eaton 