CHAPTER 15 The Reproduction of Mothering : Unlocking Italian Women’s Fiction from the Fin-de-siècle Onwards Ursula Fanning Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering was a text that helped me (and several other critics working in Italian Studies, particularly those engaged in feminist criticism) to understand some of the striking recur- rent structures and patterns in Italian women’s ﬁction at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to explain the absolute centrality of the mother-daughter bond in these ﬁctions across the two centuries. I had begun work on a Ph.D. thesis in Italian Studies in the mid-1980s; speciﬁcally, I was interested at that point in the output of Matilde Serao, a Neapolitan writer (1856–1927) who had been well-known in her own lifetime, and had attracted a good deal of favorable (as well as some unfa- vorable, and often blinkered) critical comment in the course of her writing life. Her work was both popular and critically esteemed in France, in U. Fanning (B ) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: ursula.fanning@ucd.ie © The Author(s) 2021 P. Bueskens (ed.), Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55590-0_15 329