Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 40

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Popular Culture Review

independent-minded women, dashing faithless men, steep rises,
steeper falls. The combination made her esp>ecially popular among
shopgirls, parlour-maids, manservants, and the more literate
military. In 1871 she settled in Tuscany, the scene of many of her
novels and stories. She fell in love with an impecunious Italian
marquis who took advantage but refused to marry her. Five "peasant
novels" treat the lower classes with realism and sympathy, the
upper class being typically portrayed as dissolute and predatory.
She also championed the cause of antivivisection (her novel Puck is
told from the viewpoint of a Maltese terrier) and, a lover of nature,
she was forced to vacate her villa in Florence for refusing to trim
foliage. As long as her audience remained loyal, the snobbish O iida
lived extravagantly, like the very aristocrats she derided. But the
fate of the popular novelist is tied to public taste: around 1890 it
changed and O iid a did not. Her last years were unhappy and she
died destitute in Viareggio.
In Maremma, the last of the "peasant novels," appieared in three
volumes in 1882. The action takes place sometime after 1860 in the
coastal marshland known as the Marenruna in southern Tuscany and
northeast Latium, that is, in ancient Etruria. In the Etruscan
hegemony (8th to 3rd century B.C.) the Maremma lay partly under
water and the coast afforded fine harbors. By the 2nd century B.C.
the harbors were silting up, the Romans discontinued the drainage
system, and the Marenruna reverted to sea lagoons and floodlands. It
furnished Dante with a model for the wood of the suicides in Hell
Unf. 13.134-9) and his Pia de' Tolomei dies there ("Siena made me,
Maremma undid me") {Purg. 5.134). Pia’s story became a romantic
setpiece, as in Felicia Hemans's The Maremma (1829). (The tradition
persists in Eliot's ironic allusion to Pia in The Waste Land:
"Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew/Undid me.") With Cities
and Cemeteries of Etruria (1845) George Dennis did more than anyone
in the English-speaking world to kindle interest in the Etruscans. His
title was well-chosen, for while he investigated the Etruscan cities
and landscape, he devoted close attention to its cemeteries, its greater
cities of the dead, which were yielding a seemingly boundless fund of
archaeological riches. For later writers the Marenruna called to mind
the stagnant marshes of the classical underworld, with their
confusion of land and water, form and decay, life and death.