The Dreamer.(Elsa Morante )(Interview)

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

Glamorous and sharp-witted, the Italian novelist Elsa Morante lived as tempestuously as she wrote.

The brilliant yet undeservedly little-known Italian writer Elsa Morante thought people generally fell into three categories--one might be like Achilles, who was driven by passion; a Don Quixote, who followed his dreams; or a Hamlet, who questioned everything. She herself was all Quixote. Her singular personality--and remarkable voice--are at the center of National Book Award--winner Lily Tuck's captivating biography Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (Harper), which moves from Fascist Rome to the golden age of Cinecitta to re-create a life of exuberant determination.

Born in 1912, Elsa grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Rome. By the age of five she was writing poems with flawless rhyme and meter. Determined to be a writer, she left home at eighteen--unheard of for respectable young women in Mussolini's era--and in 1937 met the more established author Alberto Moravia, who remembers her as being so poor he gave her one of his suits to remake into a tailleur of her own (even in lean years, the gamine Morante was always stylish). He married her in 1941, later admitting, "I wasn't in love, but I was fascinated by an extreme, heartrending, passionate quality in her character. It was as if every day of her life were the last."

Dividing their time between an apartment overlooking the Borghese Gardens and Capri, where Morante could be spotted walking her Siamese cat on a leash, Morante and Moravia had a short-lived idyll: Both half-Jewish, they fled German-occupied Rome and spent nine months in a mountain hut, ...