Elisavet Moutzan-Martinengou

Elisavet Moutzan was born on 2 October 1801 on Zakynthos, in the Ionian Islands, into an old aristocratic family; her parents were Fragkiskos Moutzan and Angeliki Sigourou. Her name also appears as Elisabeth, Moutza or Martinegou. A girl of her class was expected to stay inside the family house. In her own account she describes a closed world in which a young woman could hardly go out, and in which her wish to study seemed strange to the people around her. She had little formal teaching and learned a great deal on her own, reading ancient Greek and Italian.

Her deepest wish was to live for study and writing. She asked to enter a convent, less from religious calling than as a way to escape marriage and confinement, and her family refused. She also tried, without success, to leave Zakynthos secretly for Italy. She recalls how news of the Greek Revolution of 1821 stirred her so much that she wished she could take up arms herself. In 1831, after long negotiations between the families, she married Nikolaos Martinengos. She died in 1832, shortly after the birth of her son, Elisavetios; sources differ on how many days later.

Elisavet wrote a great deal: plays in Greek and in Italian, poems, and prose translations of ancient works such as Aeschylus’s Προμηθεύς Δεσμώτης (Prometheus Bound) and Homer’s Οδύσσεια (Odyssey). Almost all of this is lost. Only scattered pieces survive beside her one complete work.

That work is her Αυτοβιογραφία (Autobiography), completed in 1831. Written in the first person, it explains to her family, and to later readers, why she refused the life planned for her. She describes days spent shut in, her hunger for books, her hope of being useful to society and her fear for her own writings, which she addresses almost as her children. The language is the spoken Greek of the Ionian upper class, mixed with Italian loanwords and church vocabulary, so it sounds older and more formal today. Her son published the text in Athens in 1881 under the title Η Μήτηρ μου (My Mother), but he cut passages, so readers today have an abridged version. Scholars widely regard it as the first Modern Greek prose text by a woman, and as a rare first-person record of daily life in the Ionian Islands.

The Αυτοβιογραφία is now a classic of Modern Greek literature. Greek pupils meet extracts in the textbook Κείμενα Νεοελληνικής Λογοτεχνίας (Texts of Modern Greek Literature) for the third year of lower secondary school. The text has been re-edited several times, most recently in 2021, and translated into English (1989) and French (2020). Dido Sotiriou’s youth novel Οι επισκέπτες (The Visitors, 1979) is in dialogue with her story, and Greek theatres have brought it to the stage. Her portrait by Nikolaos Kantounis belongs to the National Gallery in Athens. Try this: read her line «χωρίς να δύναμαι να πηγαίνω», replace the old verb δύναμαι with μπορώ, then write two sentences about your school years: Μπορούσα να… (I could…) and Δεν μπορούσα να… (I could not…).

• Her son published the Αυτοβιογραφία in 1881, exactly fifty years after she completed it.
• She wrote that news of the 1821 Revolution made her blood grow warm.
• Her portrait was painted by the Zakynthian painter Nikolaos Kantounis around 1832.
• Library catalogues list her under many spellings, including Moutza, Moutsa and Martinegou.