Transformative encounters: Sally Rooney and the moral worlds of Natalia Ginzburg

This article discusses how Irish writer Sally Rooney takes up the moral universe outlined in the novels and essays of Jewish-Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991). Through a close reading of Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), it argues that Rooney partly draws her ethics of interpersonal entanglement from Ginzburg’s specifically Jewish ethical sensitivity to fragility and contingency and her essays on human relationships in the modern world. Secondly, it suggests that the pursuit of happiness undertaken by Rooney’s protagonists constitutes a deepening and reframing of Ginzburg’s discourse on contentment and discontentment in the novel Happiness, As Such (2019 [1973]). The marriage of these two elements (Rooney through Ginzburg and Ginzburg through Rooney) situates Natalia Ginzburg firmly within a genealogy of Italian women writers on whom contemporary Anglophone women writers are drawing to depict their own broken worlds and troubled selves.