For She Distinguished Herself, First Among All

About the Book

Giuseppa lived a happy and favored childhood in a familial-and-social culture that rendered her forever honest, respectful, subordinate, submissive, and silent. In adulthood, that same culture forced her into an arranged and mutually loveless marriage. It also sent her to America, where she continued to see herself misunderstood, unappreciated, disrespected, and mistreated as daughter, wife, mother, and woman. Her story, which covers the first seventy of her ninety-three years of her life, exemplifies the moral, cultural, and spiritual mores of her time and place and evokes psychological, historical, sociological, ethnic, and gender paradigms.

About the Author

Having published scholarly books, articles, and reviews as an English professor and medieval scholar, Edward Vasta, now retired, succumbs to his lifelong love of creative writing, for which he received, in 1979, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.