L'Esclusa

L'Esclusa (English: The Excluded Woman) was Luigi Pirandello's first novel. Written in 1893 with the title Marta Ajala, it was originally published in episodes in the Roman newspaper La Tribuna from the 29th of June to the 16th of August 1901 with the definitive title L'Esclusa. It was finally republished in single volume in 1908 in Milan by the Fratelli Treves. In this edition, a letter dedicated to Luigi Capuana was also published in which the author expressed his concerns that the "humoristic foundation" of the novel might have escaped those who had read the newspaper version. He also points out that "every will is excluded, even though the characters are left with the full illusion that they are acting voluntarily." He added that "nature, without any apparent order, bristling with contradictions is often extremely remote from the work of art..." which almost always arbitrarily harmonizes and rationalizes reality.

These were striking assertions which seemed decidedly remote from the realism that actually dominates the novel. But this would be his one of his final experiments with narrative realism (at least in the novel form) and, in it, he succeeds in demonstrating the genre's obvious limitations and insufficiency.