Antifascist, Feminist, Timeless: On Alba de Céspedes’s There’s No Turning Back

Alba de Céspedes’s There’s No Turning Back was published in 1938. She had previously published story collections, a book of poems, and a short novel, and had written for various newspapers and journals. Arnoldo Mondadori, the publisher of There’s No Turning Back, had decided to launch the book with an extensive publicity campaign. It was directed at critics, often personally solicited; at foreign publishers, appealed to by a list of translations in progress; and, finally, at the public of readers, with posters and flyers, window displays, and other advertising initiatives, including a van carrying a billboard on its roof. In a letter to the critic Pietro Pancrazi, Mondadori wrote:

Recently I published There’s No Turning Back, [a] novel by a very young writer, Alba de Céspedes, in whom I think I’ve found an exceptional artistic temperament. I launched this novel with means I’ve rarely used for young writers, and the welcome of public and critics so far has been what I hoped for. The first edition sold out in a week, and the first judgments have been passionately favorable.

There’s No Turning Back follows eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome, most of whom are studying at the university. They come from different backgrounds, have different desires and goals, and make different choices, yet they are united in the task of finding their way in the world. “It’s as if we’re on a bridge,” one of the girls says. “We’ve already departed from one side and haven’t yet reached the other. What we’ve left behind we don’t look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don’t know what we’ll find when the fog clears.”

The story, which covers the period from the autumn of 1934 to the summer of 1935, is told in the third person from eight points of view, switching back and forth among the eight young women. De Céspedes is remarkably skillful at maintaining the consistency and individuality of the different voices as she keeps the narrative going. (Besides the eight young women, one of the nuns, in a briefer role, presents yet another version of a woman’s choice.)

By the time the novel was published, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had been in power for more than a decade. His government promoted the idea that the proper place of women was to be at home and to bear children: sposa e madre esemplare (exemplary wife and mother). While there is no overt mention of Mussolini or Fascism in the novel (apart from a reference to “the Party” and to the war in Ethiopia), none of the young women conform to this female ideal. In fact, in their different ways they are challenging it, even if not intentionally or even consciously. In 1935 de Céspedes herself was arrested and briefly jailed for “antifascism.”

The book was immediately and immensely popular, but, not surprisingly, the authorities found the novel’s breaking of female stereotypes and suggestion of other possible pathways for women offensive. “Who can forget having been master of herself?” another of the young women says. “In our villages…those who remained, who passed from the father’s authority to the husband’s, can’t forgive us for having had the key to our own room, going out and coming in when we want.”

In 1939, the novel was to win the prestigious Viareggio Prize, but the honor was immediately canceled by an order to the jury from the government. In January of 1940, when There’s No Turning Back was already in its twentieth printing, the Ministry of Popular Culture blocked further editions, claiming that it went against “fascist morality.” (The publisher got around this ban by continuing to reprint the book and simply calling each reprinting the twentieth.)

The ban also affected Fuga (Flight), a collection of stories de Céspedes published in 1940. The following year, the censors rejected a screenplay based on the novel, labeling it “depressing “and “immoral.” Rewritten to focus on the more cheerful (“serene and optimistic”) characters, it was accepted, and the film came out in 1945. (Ultimately, one character was eliminated entirely and another given a more conventional ending.)

De Céspedes revised the text of There’s No Turning Back frequently, most heavily between 1948 and 1952, and again in 1955. The last version is the text on which this translation is based. An earlier published English translation, of 1941, was based on the original 1938 text, and, as the scholar Sandra Carletti points out in her 1995 dissertation on the novel, was marred by numerous mistakes and inaccuracies. De Céspedes’s interventions were stylistic, linguistic, and structural; in all her revisions, she was, the Italian academic Marina Zancan notes in her commentary on the text in the Meridiani volume of de Céspedes’s novels, aiming at an alleggerimento, lightening, or snellimento, streamlining, of the text.

In all her novels de Céspedes investigates women’s attempts to both deconstruct and construct their lives and gain a sense of themselves, as she investigated her own life. In Her Side of the Story (1949), a woman who thinks her marriage to an antifascist professor will be a way out of the oppressive patriarchal system she has grown up in is violently disappointed; in Forbidden Notebook (1952), a woman who, in the aftermath of the war, and amid slowly changing conceptions of women’s roles (and possibilities), decides to keep a diary grapples with her own self-awareness. There’s No Turning Back could be seen as a kind of laboratory for de Céspedes (though her women never become “types”) as she explores the ways in which women go out into the world and the choices and hardships they face. And, even if the world has changed, her characters’ struggles with becoming themselves continue to be familiar.

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From There’s No Turning Back by Alba De Céspedes, translated by Ann Goldstein. Introduction copyright © 2025 by Ann Goldstein. Available from Washington Square Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.