Natalia Ginzburg’s value system impacted her poetics and her artistic production over her entire career as a writer. After the publication of Lessico famigliare (1963) through her death (1991) her youthful belief in the ideals of justice and liberty evolved to reflect the growing importance, for her, of social and economic equality: once liberty from fascist dictatorship had been achieved, justice became more prevalent in her thoughts and writings. Concomitant with the evolution of her belief system was an increasing pessimism concerning the development of Italian society, specifically the loss of what she called a “senso sociale”: the ability and desire to put egoistic interests aside in the name of a greater good, engage one’s fellow humans in a fecund, dialectical way, and transform reality. In her non-fictions of this later period, the focus of this essay, Ginzburg ponders the Italians’ disengagement or retreat from the present, a situation that in turn was responsible for what she called our “broken relationship with the future” while advocating the interdependence of literature and world.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Francese, J., (2025), "On Justice and Liberty in Natalia Ginzburg's Non-Fictional Writings", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Francese, Joseph. "On Justice and Liberty in Natalia Ginzburg's Non-Fictional Writings." Quaderni d'italianistica 30 (1): 2009. 147-168. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v30i1.8430. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.