Throughout history, women’s abilities and talents have often been ignored or deliberately forgotten by literary criticism, leading to their total exclusion from the socio-cultural context of their time. Among the authors who fell into oblivion is Olivier Chantal (1843–1913), the pseudonym of Léontine Gruvelle and the wife of the Barletta-born painter Giuseppe De Nittis. Undoubtedly a modern and revolutionary woman for her era, she succeeded in distinguishing herself both through her artistic originality and through her ability to preserve over time the works of her husband, a great Impressionist painter. The author of numerous short stories and three novels, written with the aim of overcoming the psychological trauma caused by her spouse’s death, the Italo-French writer is today absent from any literary compendium or from texts concerning nineteenth-century women’s writing, and for this very reason she has been defined by literary criticism as a romancière oubliée.
