At the heart of Alba de Céspedes’ debut novel There’s No Turning Back lies the centuries-debated question: What is ‘immoral’ in literature? It is as complex a topic as a philosophical discussion on moral standards, with countless definitions of what it means to be ‘moral’ or ‘immoral.’ Nietzsche considered ‘immoral writing’ to reveal deeper truths about the darkness of humanity and the hidden sicknesses of the heart; in that same spirit, Oscar Wilde famously contended that there are no immoral books, only well written or poorly written ones. Even with so many valuable perspectives to turn to, provocative philosophical experiments can be futile in the face of state power and authority. Vague accusations of ‘immorality’ have been, and continue to be, used by dominant institutions, governments and autocratic regimes to stifle free expression and to censor legions of books and artworks. There’s No Turning Back was one of them, branded immoral by Mussolini’s Fascist regime shortly after it was first published in 1938.
Moral standards are upheld by faithful arbiters, and in de Céspedes’ case, that arbiter was both fearsome and deeply misogynistic. In 1937, a decade after seizing power in Italy, Benito Mussolini wrote in depth on his views on women to the American magazine Plain Talk. “Women never created anything,” he wrote, “Look around you in any direction you like—art, drama, law, medicine—and you cannot point to any single instance where a woman has created anything that has been passed down to posterity.” Bucking against modernity and burgeoning women’s liberation across the western world, Mussolini’s Fascists stood unequivocally for tradition, patriarchal authority and biological determinism. Masculine posturing, brute force, repression, and militaristic hierarchies defined his movement and style of authoritarianism. Fascists viewed a woman’s highest moral purpose and primary duty to the state within her role as sposa e madre esemplare—exemplary wife and mother. To varying degrees of success, they attempted to exert control over women’s roles in society, establishing institutions and policies that commodified women’s biological labor, that kept women out of prestigious occupations and wage-earning work, that produced propaganda to glorify motherhood and remind women of their proper role in the home.
Layered atop these attitudes was the fact that Mussolini fancied himself a creative genius. He had begun his career as a journalist and polemicist writing for socialist newspapers; he even wrote a romance novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress, a lurid tale of an illicit affair between a 17th century cardinal and a woman named Claudia, which he would later call a novel of “seamstresses and scandal.” He viewed his political work as an aesthetic enterprise, and would ultimately exert personal control over Italy’s creative production, presiding both directly and indirectly over a rigorous censorship program. So it was that Il Duce, a man who believed that women never should create anything aside from a home and children, had final say over what made a worthy, generation-defying creative endeavor.
A year after Mussolini’s comments in Plain Talk, a young Alba de Céspedes would sell well over 10,000 copies of There’s No Turning Back within its first few months of publication. At first, the novel was a critical and commercial success, even within Fascist circles and among Fascist-aligned critics. There’s No Turning Back escalated De Céspedes’ reputation, but a successful literary debut put the young woman in a precarious position—less as a matter of the content of her novel, more a matter of the author’s character. By this point in time, de Céspedes, the daughter of an Italian aristocrat and a Cuban diplomat from a prominent political family, had already lived a very full life. At the age of 12, she was married off to a man twenty years her senior; by 16, she was a young divorcee with a child. Notably, she began writing and became politically active in leftist circles; by 1935, the regime had opened a file on her after she was arrested for making anti-fascist comments to a friend on a tapped phone conversation.
In spite of her political problems, de Céspedes’ novel published to resounding success in Italy and in over thirty different countries, thanks in part to her publisher Arnaldo Mondadori, who believed wholeheartedly in her work, and remained shrewdly in good standing with the regime as a practicality. As they prepared her next publication, a set of short stories, they sent her writing straight to Mussolini himself, to demonstrate her talent and ultimately receive some form of approval for her work. She received an icy response. Mussolini would brand her a “good but immoral writer” and not long after, de Céspedes’ career would face significant pushback from the regime, who made it extremely hard for the young writer to publish anything further. Those same Fascist-aligned critics would turn on her. De Céspedes would later recall: “Every day Fascists wrote against the book. I appeared 17 times before the censorship commission for this book and they always sent me back.”
There’s No Turning Back tells the intertwined stories of eight young women who live in a religious boarding house in Rome, the Grimaldi, from 1934 to 1936. These women — Vinca, Valentina, Augusta, Silvia, Xenia, Anna, Milly, and Emmanuela — come from varied backgrounds, and board at the Grimaldi for different reasons. Each girl attempts to define her future in the novel, confronting tough choices, navigating her own tribulations. Contemporary readers will find a coming of age tale that centers a close group of girlfriends, one that predates standard bearers of the genre like Mary McCarthy’s The Group, while incorporating multiple storylines and consciousnesses in the vein of Woolf’s The Waves. The novel derives its title from a moment of on-the-nose symbolism, when Silvia realizes that, in their collective experiences, the girls have passed a point of no return on their journeys to adulthood:
We’re 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.
The Grimaldi is run by a group of strict nuns, but while the residence functions as a kind of constrictive prison that surveils the girls, it also serves as a space for liberation. In spite of the daily prayers and strict curfews, within the walls of the boarding house, the young women can study, self-actualize and “exchange whispered confidences” without intrusion—specifically, male intrusion. Depicted in shimmering detail, the Grimaldi embodies the intimacies and specificities of the women-only space, what de Céspedes would later refer to in an interview as “the female microcosm.” When a Christmas Day gathering in Augusta’s room results in light sparring about the meaning of love over dried figs and wine and chestnuts, Anna affirms:
But it’s nice to talk like this, among ourselves, all women. If there were a man here, we wouldn’t dare to be sincere. I wouldn’t know how to be even with my father—in fact with him less than with others. Women are sincere only among themselves. Isn’t it true? When my father leaves the house, my mother and I take another tone. I have no idea why, but there’s always a certain hostility toward men.
With each other, the girls find safety, and in kind, their individual narratives unfold with sincerity and intimacy. As de Céspedes dives into her characters’ interiority, she develops a narrative voice that feels like a friend recounting these stories in conversation. In this vein, There’s No Turning Back has no central plot, but rather, expansive, dramatic arcs, intertwined storylines, running threads. As the narratives progress, each story contends squarely with Fascist ideals of womanhood—the reductive concept of sposa e madre esemplare. As they make their way through the world, each girl will ultimately transgress this ideal, either through a quest for education or personal success, or in the choices they make in response to hardship and struggle.
The closest readers get to a main protagonist is the character of Emanuela. Within the first few pages, we learn that Emanuela has a secret daughter born out of wedlock, who she visits during her free time. That Emanuela is an unmarried young mother would have been a controversial, perhaps even punishable, characterization for Mussolini’s Italy, but de Céspedes, illustrating the story in flashbacks and interior monologues, sows doubt into the question of whether or not Emanuela is an immoral character. We learn that her lover, Stefano, a member of the Air Force, had intended to marry her but was tragically killed in a plane crash. After she gives birth to a daughter, Stefania, she is beholden to a series of events outside her control. Emanuela’s parents, wealthy Florentine intellectuals, place her young child at a boarding school in Rome. Emanuela, who cannot bear to be separated from the child, decides to live at the Grimaldi to be closer to her. To preserve her reputation, her friends and family in Florence believe that she’s traveling in America. Meanwhile, Emanuela uses a similar lie to obfuscate her background to the other girls, who assume she’s at the Grimaldi because her rich parents are taking an extended holiday in America. In Emanuela’s storyline, readers get a small taste of a recurring motif in de Céspedes’ oeuvre, that of a flawed idealization of America and American culture—that said, a more in-depth look at this motif would warrant its own essay.
Doubly imprisoned, Emanuela remains constricted in her own web of lies. An expectation of propriety keeps Emanuela separated from her child, despite the fact that she desperately wants to be closer to her. Hiding this secret weighs on her conscience:
At home, at the Grimaldi, with Stefania—everywhere she played a different role, had a different life, another character. But which was truly her? She needed the strength to summon her friends and say: ‘Listen, I’ve told you a lot of lies . . . But maybe they would all go away if they knew that she was ‘on the other shore.’
Emanuela spends most of the novel grappling with whether or not to reveal the truth, which becomes even more immediate once she starts dating a student named Andrea. By every standard, to be sposa e madre esemplare is out of Emanuela’s reach due to forces outside of her control, and layered onto all of this is Emanuela’s fundamental desire to self-actualize beyond every role she must inhabit:
She harbored an undefined feeling that at times made her wish for peace, at times drove her to flee from it, fearing its monotony. She deplored the emptiness of her life without aspirations: but nothing, until now, had satisfied her. She had an innate discontent, along with a solid capacity to adapt, not to mention a vague longing for sacrifice, for altruism.
Ultimately, de Céspedes renders Emanuela faultless — sure, she carries this shameful secret, but the true villain of her story is the burden she must bear because of impossible societal demands.
However, the most compelling—and perhaps most controversial—arc belongs to Xenia, whose story largely occurs outside of the walls of the Grimaldi. She fails her thesis defense, and ashamed to return to her provincial family who have mortgaged their lives for her education, Xenia drops out of school, escapes the residence, and runs away to Milan to find work. Alone, with “nothing to do in that city,” she struggles in spite of her competence and education. Through Xenia, readers can recognize the specific time and place, as she despairs in front of a job recruiter for not having proper credentials for employment: “I’m not enrolled in the Party or the employment office, I have no references. I know it’s not your fault, it’s the rules. And in the meantime I’m going to die of hunger.”
While toiling at an hourly job at a glove store, Xenia meets a charming older man named Dino who does some sort of unnamed “business” and executes many “deals.” He secures her a secretarial job at X&X Company, an agency that sells American gas for cars, and showers her with gifts, favors, dinners, exposing her to a wealthy, glitzy, cosmopolitan crowd. When he takes her on a trip to San Remo,Xenia realizes she must become his lover to ensure her survival.
De Céspedes illustrates Xenia’s choice as an economic one, in which she must set aside her own desires to stay afloat. In a long winded, distressing internal monologue, as she tries to “overcome an emotion similar to the physical sensation of feeling slightly unwell” Xenia deludes herself, creating this illusion of control in her choice to cross over from the life of a “respectable” educated girl to another life entirely:
She tried to convince herself that, these days, family and marriage don’t have much importance; she even tried to laugh at them. “The truth is that not many women have the courage to confess: I’d like to have a lover, yes, I’ll take one.”
The decision to sleep with Dino works out in her favor, when he offers her 20 thousand lire to buy an apartment in Milan and a monthly salary to use at her discretion. All of sudden, Xenia is wealthy, living as a kept woman, in her own home with her name engraved on the brass plate. But when Dino’s business dealings land him in jail, and Xenia is passed over to another, more powerful patron named Horsch, she quickly realizes that she is beholden to the whims of the men who support her.
Xenia’s story, centered around the different ways that love can be commodified, challenges the idea of love as the core source of a woman’s happiness. In one of her final scenes, Xenia takes a solo trip, driving alone to Nice, in the South of France, as a bit of a break from her daily grind in Milan. After all of her uncertainty, stress and self-abandonment, she finds a bit of peace—and space to think—in a moment of solitude, soaking in a hotel bathtub: “Of all pleasures, being alone was incomparable: enjoying herself, her company, her image.” As she contemplates this state of aloneness and the sequence of events that led her to it, Xenia realizes that she is “perfectly happy” despite never having been in love. Here, de Céspedes dares her readers to imagine women achieving forms of happiness and pleasure outside of the spheres of love, work and motherhood.
There’s No Turning Back bursts with all kinds of subtle impropriety—the imperfections, contradictions, and impure thoughts that come with honest psychological portraits. Each storyline is packed with drama and revelation: from Silvia, who develops a boundary-pushing relationship with an older married professor; to Vinca, a character of Spanish origin who is fleeing the raging Civil War in her home country; to Anna, who feels a deep urge to leave Rome and move back to her rural town in Puglia. Notably, de Céspedes even dives into the story of Sister Lorenza, a beloved nun at the Grimaldi who, during the course of the novel, loses her shine as she is elevated to the role of Mother Superior. These are women who attempt to negotiate their destinies, who do not, or who by design cannot, take what society has prescribed them. De Céspedes allows their struggles to be seen plainly, itself a challenge against patriarchy, as well as the inherent maleness and misogyny baked into the Fascist ideology. Through this novel, she contributes to a grand tradition of literature for and by women — writing, as she puts it, “women as they are and not as society would like them to be.”
For the Fascists, that was an immoral endeavor.
The publication—and subsequent censorship—of There’s No Turning Back marked the beginning of de Céspedes’ life of resistance. Her anti-fascist activities would continue throughout the Second World War, in part the result of the exclusion she would face after the censorship of her work. At one point, she fled Rome after the German invasion, spending months on the run in Southern Italy, only to turn up as a resistance radio personality broadcasting under the pseudonym Clorinda. Immediately after the war and the end of the Fascist regime, she founded a journal called Mercurio, where she published some of the most popular writers of the day, including Alberto Moravia and Natalia Ginzburg. She experienced great popularity and celebrity as a widely read writer in Italy, known mostly for her novels, including the newly re-issued and championed Forbidden Notebook and Her Side of the Story. Her oeuvre would include screenplays, essays, and a regular women’s advice column. From there, she disappeared from the Italian literary scene after moving to Paris in the 1960’s, where she died in 1997 and faded into relative obscurity.
There’s No Turning Back is an erudite, courageous work, and a stark reminder that not even a hundred years ago, to reveal and resonate the truth of women’s experiences was nothing short of a transgression. Nearly a century after its first publication, de Céspedes’ work finds a new life, assuming a rightful place in the feminist canon, and—perhaps to the chagrin of Mussolini himself—passing down to posterity through a whole new generation of readers. Pouring into this novel can spark a bit of schadenfreude, given that Fascists did everything in their power to stop this book from circulation and stifle the career of its author. Armed with this context, a reader can and should perform her own act of transgression. After all, what could be more fun than reading something that a bunch of Fascists didn’t want you to read in the first place?