Alba de Céspedes

Alba de Céspedes (1911–1997) was a Cuban-born Italian novelist, one of the most widely read Italian writers of the twentieth century. Her experimental novel Forbidden Notebook — a woman's secret diary recounting the slow erosion of a 1950s housewife's selfhood — has been rediscovered as a proto-feminist classic.

The daughter of a Cuban diplomat, Céspedes lived in Italy, worked underground in the Resistance, and wrote for a mass readership without abandoning sophistication. Forbidden Notebook was a bestseller on publication in 1952 and is today celebrated for anticipating the concerns of second-wave feminism.