Dalla biografia alla storia e ritorno: Iris Origo tra Bloomsbury e Toscana

From Biography to History and back: Iris Origo between Bloomsbury and Tuscany
An independent scholar of Anglo-American background, Iris Origo (1902-1988) lived and wrote in Italy. She is remembered as the author of several biographies, as well as of a pioneering volume of social history, The Merchant of Prato (1957). Based on her unpublished papers and correspondence, this essay tries to reconstruct her intellectual profile and to assess her contribution to 20th-century historiography. In The Merchant of Prato Origo creatively applied to history the “New Biography” model advocated by key figures of the Bloomsbury circle, such as Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. Her case suggests that we may have overestimated the role of the French «Les Annales» School in the renewal of 20th-century historical writing. In fact, Origo’s innovative approach to the history of the family, marriage, and women did not derive from «Les Annales» but was inspired by new trends in English historiography, in particular by the work of Eileen Power on social history and women’s history, and, more generally, by Bloomsbury’s critical revision of late Victorian cultural standards.