Charlotte's Secret in Italian

Albus Edizioni releases the first Italian translation of Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia piece The Secret: 

Il segreto
ALBUSedizioni, 2012
Collana - Classica
ISBN: 978-88-96099-61-2
Edition and Translation by Maddalena De Leo

The juvenile work The secret by Charlotte Brontë has been published in Italian for the first
time on 2nd March. The translator and editor of the little book published by Albus is Prof.
Maddalena De Leo who already translated and edited Brontë’s Henry Hastings in 2009 also for
Albusedizioni and other Juvenilia as Mina Laury and Stancliffe Hotel etc. (Ripostes).

The Secret focuses on Charlotte’s heroine, Marian Hume, the child bride of the dark, brooding
and temperamental Marquis of Douro (also known as Arthur Wellesley II and the Duke of
Zamorna, the oldest son of Charlotte’s hero, the fictionalized Duke of Wellington). The story is
narrated by the Marquis’ younger brother, Charles Wellesley.

The manuscript of The Secret was first documented by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s biographer,who probably saw it just after her death. The first page of “The Secret” was reproduced in Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which was published in 1857. The manuscript was also included in Shorter’s The Brontës: Life and Letters, which was published in 1908.

No information is available on the manuscript’s whereabouts between 1915 and 1973, and it was presumed lost. However, the manuscript was rediscovered among the personal papers of Evelyn Wadsworth Symington, wife of United States Senator Stuart Symington, after her death in 1973.

The Italian book can boast a colourful cover and an exhaustive introduction by the editor herself.