In the closing years of the century there was published in Milan a volume of lyrics by one Annie Vivanti, which was praised intemperately by Carducci and by the _Nuova Antologia_. She had some fiction to her credit which dealt chiefly with the life of the stage, but her advent into the world of letters was like a shooting star; nothing was known of her origin save that she was said to have been born in London, and there was some mystery about her career. In her poetry there was a true lyric wail, especially in "Destino" ("Destiny"), "Non Sarà mai" ("It Can Never Be"), that appealed tremendously to the public mind. Had she been productive she might have been compared to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. After her marriage to Mr. Chartres, a London journalist, she became better known as the mother of a child-wonder violinist. Amongst her romances the one which had greatest popularity was entitled "I Divoratori" ("The Devourers"). It is obviously the story of her life and of her daughter's career, the record of filial shortcomings steeped in wormwood. The third of these interesting writers, half Armenian, half Italian, was Vittoria Aganoor, who was born in Padua in 1855. In 1900 she published a volume called "Leggenda Eterna" ("Eternal Legend"), which showed her to be a sincere, impassioned artist with a pronounced leaning toward the sentimental. She died in London in the spring of 1910, after a surgical operation, and a few hours later her husband, Guido Pompili, killed himself. Her best-known poems are "Il Canto dell' Ironia" ("The Song of Irony"), "La vecchia Anima sogna ... " ("The Old Soul Dreams"), "Mamà, sei tu?" ("Mother, Is It Thou?"). A complete volume of her poetry was published in 1912. Italians are astonished when women make a great stir in the world. They have had no Jeanne d'Arc or Florence Nightingale. Their historic women have been mostly mystics who would punish the flesh that they might become spiritually pure, but the generation that is now passing has had five women, four at least of whom will have to be discussed by any historian of the intellectual movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They are Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda, Maria Montessori, Eusapia Palladino, and Eleanora Duse, and most space will be given to Duse.