Iris Origo was a British-born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s. During the Second World War, she sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy’s fascist regime and Nazi occupied forces. She is the author of Images and Shadows; A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 (NYRB Classics); Leopardi: A Study in Solitude; and The Merchant of Prato, among others.
Books in order of publication:
Gianni, a privately printed memorial to Iris’s son – 1933
Allegra (1935), a short life of Byron’s daughter
Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (1935; second edition 1953), a biography of Giacomo Leopardi
Tribune of Rome: A Biography of Cola di Rienzo (1938), on the 14th-century Roman revolutionary
War in Val d’Orcia (1947; NYRB edition 2018), a diary of the last years of fascism and the liberation of Italy
The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli (1949)
Giovanni and Jane (1950), a children’s book
A Measure of Love (1957), biographical essays
The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410 (1957)
“Pope Pius II” (1961), in J. H. Plumb et al., The Horizon Book of the Renaissance, Collins 1961
Images and Shadows: Part of a Life (1970), an elegiac autobiography
The Vagabond Path (1972), an anthology
The World of San Bernardino (1963), a life of Bernardino of Siena
A Need to Testify: Portraits of Lauro de Bosis, Ruth Draper, Gaetano Salvemini, Ignazio Silone and an essay on Biography (1984) (four opponents of fascism)
Un’amica. Ritratto di Elsa Dallolio (1988), a memoir of an old friend A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 (2017), Pushkin Press, and (2018) New York Review of Books
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