Miu Miu Summer Reads

Furthering Miu Miu’s commitment to contemporary thought and culture, books are the protagonists of Summer Reads, a series of special initiatives taking place in selected cities worldwide.

In preparation for the summer season, from June 7th to 9th, 2024, taking over and customizing existing newsstands or at newly constructed locations, visitors will be gifted copies of two out of three seminal texts: Alba de Céspedes Forbidden Notebook, Sibilla Aleramo’s A Woman and Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Situated in different places and at disparate moments in history, each text was selected for its author’s brave and powerfully influential status as female creator. All their work, continually reappraised, explores concerns and ideologies that remain relevant to this day. Their voices are unique, a reflection on the lives of extraordinary women - lives as daughters, lovers, wives, mothers - as expressed through the written word. Breaking with convention and the boundaries of gender, they are united as an inspiration to every generation of women that comes after them.

The Authors:

Sibilla Aleramo (1876 - 1960), the pseudonym of Marta Felicina Faccio, was an Italian author and poet best known for producing some of the earliest feminist writing in Italy and for her autobiographical depictions of life as a woman in the late nineteenth-century. She was recipient of the prestigious Viareggio Rèpaci Award and was active in political and artistic circles throughout her adult life. Her trailblazing autobiographical novel, A Woman, reveals the reality of women in Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century. First published in 1906, it is a landmark in European feminist writing.

Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) was born in Hampshire, England, and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. The daughter of a clergyman, as a child and teenager, she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her family's amusement, as well as a novella, Lady Susan. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility, (1811). It was followed by Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1817. The latter, her last novel, tells the story of a woman who, after years struggling with notions of propriety and social diktats, discovers her true feelings, and with that self-awareness.

Alba de Céspedes (1911 – 1997) was a Cuban-Italian writer who worked as a journalist in for Piccolo, Epoca and La Stampa in the 1930s. She wrote her first novel, L’Anima Degli Altri, in 1935. That same year, and again in 1943, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. De Céspedes wrote the screenplay for Michelangelo’s Antonioni’s 1955 film Le Amiche. First published in 1952, and one of several ground-breaking novels, Forbidden Notebook, is a rediscovered gem of women’s literature. It explores the voice of the modern woman and her desire to escape the mundanities of everyday chauvinistic life.