[Washington Square Press; 2025]
Tr. from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Like its closest cousin, the campus novel, the boarding school novel derives much of its thematic energy from the sequestration of its characters in a place with strict rules and supervision, in which, at the same time, they discover themselves on the precipice of adulthood. This tension can manifest in cruel, mysterious eroticism, as in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock or Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, or it can stand in for the repressions of the society external to the campus, as in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Jane Eyre.
Alba de Céspedes’ 1938 debut novel There’s No Turning Back, recently translated into English for the first time, takes place not in a boarding school, per se, but in a boarding house near a university in Rome. Reading about these eight women who briefly reside together at this dormitory run by nuns, though, my thoughts kept returning to the boarding school novel. Perhaps because, in There’s No Turning Back, the unifying setting of the residence hall is a site of both liberation and infantilization: each woman is provided a room of her own, as long as she’s inside before the doors lock at night. The hall is a space free from parents, free from the past, free from men; free from the truth, free from autonomy, free from love, free from life.
There’s No Turning Back is the third of Alba de Céspedes’ books to receive a reissue in recent years. Her Side of the Story and Forbidden Notebook, both released from Astra Publishing House, are two excellent later works, the former translated by Jill Foulston, and the latter, like There’s No Turning Back, by frequent Elena Ferrante collaborator Ann Goldstein. Like the Neapolitan Novels, de Céspedes’ work is deeply invested in the lives of women, the dueling temptations of education and domesticity, and the forces of fascism and communism in Italy. Unlike that of Elena Ferrante, de Céspedes’ biography is quite well known. Born in 1911 to a Cuban diplomat and a Roman aristocrat, de Céspedes developed her writing alongside her activism as a partisan. The same year she published her first collection of short stories, she was imprisoned for anti-fascist resistance. There’s No Turning Back, released a few years later, was censored by the Italian authorities. Although the novel contains very little explicit criticism of the Mussolini government, it’s not hard to see why the book was considered subversive. In its deep sympathy for the plight of women, the novel spans taboo subjects like children born out of wedlock, adultery, masturbation, and suicide. In twentieth-century Italy, women who pursued sexual freedom were heavily punished, this novel demonstrates, and it is primarily from the turmoil of pleasure and its retribution that the school residence hall offers an escape, a refuge.
The novel opens with its characters gathering in one of their rooms, just before lights-out at the Grimaldi. The women are collected from all walks of life: Valentina and Anna come from the same provincial town, where Anna belongs to the landowning family, and Valentina to one of its tenants. Vinca, in love with Luis, hails from Andalusia; Milly, a rich student of music, is dying from a heart ailment. But here, at the Grimaldi, they are on mostly equal ground. (The wealthy boarders, on the second floor, have the luxury of electric light.) It’s a sweet scene, the friends huddled over candles, talking about their pasts and futures, but already there is a sense that this brief period of sisterhood is slipping away. Never again will all the women appear in the same room, the novel quickly shifting to a floating perspective that follows only one character at a time. Some of the boarders even seem impatient for this narrative independence. Xenia, from a farming family in the Latin Valley, describes the Grimaldi as a “prison,” and laments to her friends:
Some nights a kind of yearning grips me: I can’t close my eyes and I get worn out thinking how I’m caged in this cloister of nuns, while outside life is flowing, fortune passing by—who knows?—and I can’t take advantage of it. You have to jump into life headlong, grab it by the throat. I won’t ever go back to Veroli, anyway.
The others, too, seem to view life inside the Grimaldi as somehow insulated from the passing of time. For some of them, this hermeticism is its attraction. Augusta, the oldest of their number, who has stayed on for over seven years, using her time not to study but to write a series of unsuccessful novels, recalls a girl who left the university in order to get married. “Someone who shared every hour with us,” she says, “she didn’t even send a postcard.” “Getting married is something else,” retorts Valentina. “It’s crossing to another shore.”
The image of the shore, evoking the many sea-changes that a life in flux demands, is one to which the novel will return again and again, and it’s fitting that the recurring metaphor makes this transformation sound almost like a death. One by one, the women of the Grimaldi will abandon the security of its walls, rather like an Il Duce-era Virgin Suicides. The yearning Xenia is the first to go. Having failed her thesis defense, she flees by night, and, over the course of the book, will become first a secretary at an American oil company and then the kept mistress of an older German man who is, perhaps, involved in clandestine or black-market wartime trade. Before they know what has happened to their departed friend, her companions wonder if Xenia has, in fact, decided to kill herself, or, alternatively, to sleep with a man. The crimes are equal in their minds. Offering another perspective, Silvia declares, “She did wrong, maybe… but not because it’s a sin. Because, maybe, outside of here there’s nothing. Xenia believed there was something, she always said ‘I’ll never go back to Veroli.’ She’s gone beyond what we know. Like those who die.”
Unbeknownst to the rest of the Grimaldi group, one among them considers herself to have already crossed over. Emanuela, the closest the novel has to a protagonist, is harboring a secret: she has come to the university not to study art history, as she claims, but to be close to the school where her young daughter, conceived out of wedlock with a since-killed pilot, is now residing. Unlike the rest of her friends, Emanuela is not a virgin, a fact that she dreads and longs to reveal to the others. “She needed the strength,” she reflects, early on in the novel, “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.’ They always said: ‘This is the shore where you wait.’” Having visited and returned from that “other shore,” Emanuela intuits, seems to violate the very purpose of the cloistered dormitory. She keeps her secret hidden, while Anna leaves to marry a man from her hometown, while Silvia leaves to become an academic in Pisa, while Vinca leaves to live with a family of Spanish women and pine for Luis, gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. For the majority of the book, Emanuela even keeps her secret hidden from Andrea, the student who becomes her fiancé. Finally, when she summons the strength to embrace her past, her long period of reticence at first seems justified. A disgusted Andrea breaks off the engagement. Augusta and Valentina, the only women remaining at the Grimaldi, call her a thief and a liar. Listening to their rebukes, confronting the potential loss of her small, safe life, Emanuela thinks to herself: “At the Grimaldi one felt sheltered from the current, from floods.” For a moment, she longs for her friends to tell her: “Stay.” Sentences later, she leaves the Grimaldi behind, for good. The final pages of the novel find Emanuela at liberty, navigating the waters between the shores.
The Grimaldi may represent an imperfect alternative to life outside, but There’s No Turning Back is not starry-eyed about the prospects of women once they pass through its doors for the last time. De Céspedes’ characters are largely condemned to marital servitude, to emotional and financial dependence on men. But the significance of a university degree is also, in this book, put into bracing and realistic context. As Xenia notes, when considering the life that she gave up by leaving the Grimaldi, the only real career awaiting most of her former acquaintances is that of a teacher “in a provincial high school: cold classrooms, chilblains.” Only Emanuela is able to escape that destiny, by virtue of her money. After inheriting a fortune from her recently deceased father, she claims her daughter from her convent school and takes her sailing on an elegant cruise.
If this ending sounds rather “girlboss”-y from a writer imprisoned for her communist principles, I think it’s intentional. Despite its luxurious trappings, the cruise ship is a lot like the Grimaldi. Its passengers are brought together for a brief time, from all walks of life, knowing they will almost certainly never see each other again. The final pages of There’s No Turning Back ironize Emanuela’s decision to leave the boarding house for another enclosed, liminal space, and suggest that by doing so she will never achieve true self-fulfillment. The boarding school novel is only poignant and effective if the characters’ insulation from the outside world is temporary. For a narrative, or a life, to work, everyone must graduate and grow up some time.
One night in their earliest days at the Grimaldi, Silvia describes life at the residence hall in a kind of summary of the book itself. “It’s as if we’re on a bridge,” she says:
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. Some lean too far out, for a better view of the river, and they fall in and drown. Some, tired, sit down on the bridge and stay there. The others, for good or ill, go on to the other shore.
On the cruise ship, Emanuela dimly recalls this parable, having failed to discern its lesson. “Silvia always said something about a bridge,” she thinks to herself, “but what? I can’t remember anymore.” She goes on drinking cognac and playing cards, content inside her new, more elegant fog. In the end, only the half-remembered Silvia achieves real success in this groundbreaking feminist novel, only Silvia who truly crosses from one side of the bridge to the other. Before leaving for her teaching post in Pisa, she stops to bid farewell to the Mother Superior of the Grimaldi. She catches a glimpse of the entry form she filled out, upon her initial arrival, years before. “Why have you chosen to devote yourself to study?” the form asks. She had answered: “To live.”
Griffin Reed is a writer originally from St. Louis and currently living in Chicago. She’s the Managing Editor of Boulevard.
This post may contain affiliate links.
