Seekers of Wonder: Women Writing Folk and Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century Italy and Ireland

Women’s cultural and political engagement with oral tales and traditions in European peripheries

With Seekers of Wonder, Elena Sottilotta offers the first comparative study of women’s manifold roles in the collection of Italian and Irish folklore and fairy tales between 1870 and 1920. Sottilotta views the often-overlooked work of these women from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering both the politics and poetics of seeking wonder. In so doing, she centers women’s influence on the preservation and dissemination of oral traditions, bringing work that was once relegated to the margins into dialogue with work long regarded as canonical.

After mapping sidelined, marginalized, and forgotten women folklorists, Sottilotta narrows the focus onto four writers and collectors who were inspired by Italian and Irish insular contexts: Laura Gonzenbach, who collected Sicilian wonder tales; Grazia Deledda, who wrote Sardinian ethnographic sketches, legends, and fairy tales; Jane Wilde, who published anthologies of Irish folklore; and Augusta Gregory, who collected traditional narratives in the west of Ireland. Situated within an ongoing process of rediscovery of lesser-known collectors, tellers, and tales in the European tradition, Sottilotta relocates these figures within a broader transcultural framework.

Throughout, Sottilotta emphasizes the role of women as crucial intermediaries between different cultural groups—in particular, between the world of the “folk” and the world of scholarly folklore studies. Unearthing rare archival material and reading these writings from the perspective of gender, Sottilotta sheds light on the identity dynamics that animated the cultural phenomenon of collecting folk and fairy tales in this era.