La correttrice

How are the fates of a young nanny and the most famous novel in the history of Italian literature linked? To find out, one must step into a noble palace in 1838 Florence, where a girl named Emilia Luti, unmarried and fatherless, shuttles day and night between the children’s room and the Vieusseux Literary Cabinet to support her mother and younger sisters, in the dual role of nanny and library assistant. When Massimo d’Azeglio met her in his friend’s salon, he was struck by her frank manners and her pure Florentine and proposed that she follow him to Milan to take care of little Rina, the child he had from his first wife Giulietta, Alessandro Manzoni’s daughter. This is how Emilia makes her fearful entrance into the house of the writer who has already won the hearts of thousands of readers with his Promessi sposi (The Betrothed). The novel has been a success, but he is not satisfied. He has taken it into his head to reprint it in an illustrated edition and to completely revise the language, to bring it even closer to a Florentine capable of speaking to everyone, ‘a language that becomes the language of Italians’. Almost as a joke, he submitted a few sentences to Emilia, and impressed by her remarks began sending her notes asking for her help. The two would end up re-reading and correcting the entire novel together, between their studio in Milan and their country villa in Brusuglio, surrounded and often distracted by the vicissitudes of the cumbersome Manzoni family. Chapter after chapter, the confidence that arises when walking together in that frightening and wonder-filled place that is the words of a writer will blossom between them. Don Alessandro will reveal his fears to Emilia, and in turn Emilia will open up to him until she tells him her greatest secret. Drawing on a true story that has remained in the shadows until now, and drawing on the correspondence between Manzoni and Luti and unpublished materials that have emerged from her research, Emanuela Fontana draws a profoundly human portrait of the most idealised writer of all time and transforms Emilia into a great literary character, shrewd and free, thus doing justice to the contribution made by a young woman to the most famous novel of all time, in the version we have all read and studied.