The downfall, death and transfiguration of an elementary school teacher in Italy at the close of the 1900s. "Il romanzo d'una maestra" by Annetta Fusetti, or the triumph of petit bourgeois individualistic morality

In 1891 the Milanese publishing house Galli e Raimondi, specialized in textbooks and stories for children and young people and particularly for girls, published Il romanzo d'una maestra ("The Novel of a Schoolteacher"), written by the kindergarten teacher Annetta Fusetti. The text, even showing certain unique characteristics and original features in the genre known as "schoolteachers' novels", which had been started not too many years earlier by the writers Matilde Serao and Edmondo De Amicis, was nevertheless a modern revival of the traditional ideals and women's educational models of the ancien regime, even though adapted to the new mentality and lay-bourgeois sensitivity, and imbued with an acute awareness of the deep and rapidly changing women's existential horizon.