Alba de Céspedes’ 1938 bestseller, once banned by Fascist censors in Italy, There’s No Turning Back, follows the lives of eight young woman living at the Grimaldi, a convent/boardinghouse in Rome. The novel is the third work by de Céspedes to be translated into English in recent years, a real renaissance for this revolutionary author whom writers like Annie Ernaux and Elena Ferrante count as an inspiration. The novel, while it rarely directly touches on politics as a subject matter, is deeply political in the sense that it explores the complexities of independent female thought in a time in which the Italian fascist regime had confined women’s roles to that of wife and mother.
De Céspedes weaves seamlessly between the perspectives of the eight girls, in this polyphonic narrative that animates the Grimaldi with the lives of these women who inhabit it. Each girl has a unique voice and perspective, and is dealing with different circumstances—but each are united by this quality of searching, as they explore how they want to be in the world. The novel touches on the girls’ romantic lives: some have boyfriends or lovers who promise to take them away from the Grimaldi, another has a secret child, and another escapes to make her own way as a working woman.
What is so remarkable about these women is not their circumstances but their ability to shape them. Each of them is given a choice between one path or the other, a choice which was not the reality of many women living in Rome under the fascist regime. As one of the girls remarks, “Who can forget having been master of herself?…In our villages…those who remained, who passed from the father’s authority to the husband’s, can’t forgive us for having had the key to our own room, going out and coming in when we want.”
De Céspedes lived out these values of autonomy and independence in her own life—not only working as a prolific chronicler of women’s lives, but also briefly jailed for her work as an antifascist radio broadcaster in the 1940’s. While the women in There’s No Turning Back aren’t all revolutionaries or activists—the novel lends each a deep well of personal liberty that feels like a political choice. One of the salient images from the novel for me was: “It’s as if we’re on a bridge, we’ve already departed from one side and haven’t yet reached the other. What we’ve left behind we don’t look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don’t know what we’ll find when the fog clears.”
This idea of uncertainty and the freedom to cross the bridge and step into a future that requires the ability to choose one’s path is about an apt a metaphor for entering adulthood as I’ve heard. De Céspedes’ classic is a testament to the ability of the novel to transcend time and space to speak to readers in any circumstances.