Matilde Serao is often considered the most successful Italian woman journalist of the nineteenth century as well as an important novelist and fiction writer. A keen observer of life and a political activist, Serao wrote directly about the concerns of everyday Italians: the pressing social problems of a newly unified Italy, urban poverty, and the day-to-day lives of Italian women, whom she cast as her protagonists. In Serao's spare and simple prose, these women of turn-of-the-century Naples come to life, negotiating the details of school, work, church, and marriage in a world circumscribed by fathers, chaperones, fiances, and bosses. Infused with the writer's deep sense of humanity, her quietly involving stories - at once poetic and ordinary - attest to the transformative power of literature and to the promise that even the most humble life holds. With the publication of Unmarried Women: Stories, this collection of Serao's short fiction is available for the first time to an English-speaking audience.