Walter Starkie in Search of an Author: Romantic Fiction and Historical Truth in Pirandello

Abstract

Despite his eclectic career as a Hispanist, musician, translator, and travel writer, Walter Starkie remains a marginal figure in literary scholarship. Best known for his vivid travelogues on Romani culture and his translations of Spanish classics, Starkie’s intellectual contributions have largely been overlooked, particularly in relation to his critical writings on European literature. One such neglected work is his monograph Luigi Pirandello: The Man, the Writer, and the Mask (1926), a perceptive and unusually early English-language study of the Italian dramatist and Nobel laureate. Published at a time when Pirandello’s reputation was still in formation outside Italy, Starkie’s study stands out for its interpretive insight and for the cultural mediation it performs between Italian modernism and the English-speaking world. This article seeks to bring renewed attention to Starkie’s Pirandello book, situating it within both the critical reception of Pirandello in the early twentieth century and the broader context of Starkie’s intellectual trajectory. In doing so, it contributes to a still-scarce body of scholarship on Starkie, whose literary criticism remains overshadowed by his more popular and folkloric writings.