1. See, for example, ‘Dalla parte di lei’, Epoca , 2 May 1954.
2. Both were published by Mondadori. In the 1970s and 1980s, de Céspedes' writing was largely forgotten and, if remembered, she tended to be thought of as a writer of romantic fiction. This idea is not supported at all by her novels (except perhaps in that they have female protagonists) and may well have had more to do with the fact that she had been an agony aunt. More recently, de Céspedes has begun to receive the critical attention that she deserves. To date, the only extensive studies of her work are Carroli Piera , Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Céspedes , Longo, Ravenna, 1993 and Gallucci Carole C. and Nerenberg Ellen (eds), Writing Beyond Fiction: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ, 2000. A very useful source of biographical and bibliographical material (including an inventory of the Archivio Alba de Céspedes in Milan) is the catalogue of an exhibition held in 2000, Zancan Marina , (ed.), Alba de Céspedes, Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, Milan, 2001.
3. Despite the fact that the title of the column is that of her best-selling novel published in 1948, no letter refers directly to the plot of the novel in which the protagonist ends up murdering her husband, having been entirely misunderstood by him, and by society. If there ever was such a letter, de Céspedes chose not to publish it. Bearing in mind the plot of her novel, the use of the same title for the agony column might seem to be deliberately controversial, yet it seems that, possibly under pressure from her editors, de Céspedes chose to play down any polemical intent. For Mondadori, publisher of both Epoca and de Céspedes' novels, there was an obvious commercial advantage to using the same title.
4. Gundle Stephen , I comunisti italiani tra Hollywood e Mosca , Giunti, Florence, 1995, pp. 114–115. My translation from the Italian. This section does not appear in the English version of Gundle's book.
5. See ‘Dalla parte di lei’, Epoca , 26 February 1956, p. 12, for a discussion of this ‘generation gap’.