Mussolini Among Women Writers in 1930s Europe. Circulations between Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, Marguerite Yourcenar and Zofia Nalkowska

In her early essays, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf uses the figure of Mussolini (at first associated with Napoleon and then with Hitler) as an example to demonstrate the complicity between fascism and patriarchy, insofar as they have despised women and reduced them to their procreative role. Two questions arise: what was the reception of Woolf's essays in Europe?; and to what extent and in what form does Mussolini appear in 1930s European literature, especially among early feminist writers? The Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo met Mussolini after reading Woolf's first essay and before meeting her in 1934. As French translator of The Waves Marguerite Yourcenar met Woolf in 1937, whereas she already wrote a dreamlike narrative about a failed attempt on Mussolini's life (A Coin in Nine Hands, 1934). Although not connected to the other women writers mentioned above, the Polish writer Zofia Nalkowska made occasional references to Mussolini in her diary between 1928 and 1939, like Woolf herself did, even if the latter soon focused on Hitler. In a word, this study aims at reconstructing the networks of sociability or at least a common sensibility that may have contributed to understanding fascism as a feminist issue.