The Prescience of Alba De Céspedes' "Her Side of the Story"

By Margarita Diaz. In 1948, Alba de Céspedes wrote to her friend, the acclaimed writer Natalia Ginzburg, of a specific kind of affliction that could befall the women of their time. They called it a “well,” a “terrible melancholy” that women—still mostly confined to the domestic sphere in the immediate aftermath of WWII, not yet considered equal under the law—regularly experienced.