Reckoning with the nineteenth-century origins of folkloristics may feel like well-trodden ground, but in Seekers of Wonder, Elena Emma Sottilotta not only brings to light overlooked collectors, but also adds new layers of complexity to the history of folklore collection. The book centers on four women who published collections of folk narratives: Laura Gonzenbach, an early folklore collector working in Sicily; Grazia Deledda, the novelist who also wrote articles on the folklore of her Sardinian hometown; Jane Wilde, the writer, activist, and compiler of Irish Folklore; and Augusta Gregory, a folklorist, dramatist, and revivalist working in the west of Ireland.
Sottilotta frames these women collectors through the interdisciplinary lens of island studies. As islands, Ireland, Sardinia, and Sicily are culturally independent, isolated, and peripheral, but they also function as global crossroads. Sottilotta explores how each folklorist relates to the island culture where she works, and what she hoped to accomplish with her collecting work. She offers a balanced portrayal of scholars marginalized through gender and geography, but also privileged by their wealth and connections. By drawing extensively from primary and archival sources, and Italian-language scholarship which might be new to Anglophone readers, Sottilotta offers a model for revealing both what is overlooked and what is missing from the historical record.
After an introduction on wonder, women’s studies, and island studies, the book is structured in three sections. The first provides historical context on folklore collecting, beginning with an overview of the nineteenth-century European folklore project, but quickly moving to the specific locations of Ireland and Italy. Sottilotta traces the parallel paths of these two nations, and highlights moments of connection between the two, as when turn-of-the century Italian scholars refer to southern Italy as the “Ireland of Italy.” Ireland’s western Gaeltacht and Italy’s southern regions both captured the attention of nineteenth- century folklorists fascinated by the peripheral, rural, and disenfranchised, and both were centers of salvage folklore collection.
The second section delves into the identities and histories of the four women who participated in this endeavor, beginning with Gozenbach. Laura Gozenbach was a woman of Swiss-German origin, born and raised in Messina, and a lifelong promoter of women’s education and emancipation. Under the commission of German historian Otto Hartwig, she collected ninety-four Sicilian tales, published in 1870 as Sicilianische Märchen. Gozenbach’s collection, published only in German translation, has been rarely referenced in modern compilations of Italian folklore, but remains a rich resource of Sicilian culture.
The second collector is Italian writer and Nobel prize winner Grazia Deledda. During the first stages of her literary career, from 1891 to 1901, Deledda also collected and published legends, articles, and ethnographic sketches from her native Sardinia. Sottilotta examines the impact of Sardinian folklore on Deledda’s later work, and how her folkloric endeavors draw from her sense of community, especially for her hometown of Nuoro.
The next case study is Jane Wilde, Irish writer, poet, translator and folklorist, who wrote under the (Italian) pen name “Speranza.” A member of the privileged Anglo-Irish Protestant class, Wilde did not engage in fieldwork herself, but assembled and published two volumes of Irish folklore as Ancient Legends (1887) and Ancient Cures (1890). The only scholar of the four to break from the nineteenth-century scientistic approach to folklore, Wilde took a poetic approach, blurring the artificial lines between lore, literature, and politics.
The final collector is Lady Augusta Gregory, another Anglo-Irish woman who used folklore in her activism. Gregory conducted several collecting trips in the western Gaeltacht, and published four volumes of folklore between 1903 and 1919, including The Kiltartan History Book and The Kiltartan Wonder Book. Sottilotta also details Gregory’s efforts to learn Irish and her connection to the Irish Revival, and how her approach was shaped by a deeply romantic and idealized approach to her informants.
In section three, Sottilotta moves from the collectors to their stories, the storytellers, and the island communities. This section compiles the little available information on the storytellers, many of whose names remain unrecorded. The black-and-white illustrations are used to good effect to further bring life and form to the women whose culture makes up the collections. Next, Sottilotta explores the roles of feminine characters in the stories, from the healing and mothering Madonna to the ambiguous doñas de fuera, to the monstrous and prophetic banshee.
Sottilotta adroitly deals with the complex positionalities of these women. Each of the four was able to preserve and uplift the feminine in oral literature, but they also tended to read essentialism and primitivism into the stories. History has positioned them as secondary scholars in the shadow of their male mentors, or in the case of Wilde, her husband and son. The book concludes with a final plea to reconsider these women as folklorists and important scholars in their own right.
The book demonstrates the value of thorough archival work. Seekers of Wonder goes beyond the easily accessible scholarship, using letters, articles, and lesser-known works to draw a picture of the complex negotiations ongoing in the nineteenth century. Sottilotta identifies a wealth of connections in the correspondence between Irish and Italian writers, convincing readers that the parallel between the two countries is more than superficial or conceptual. While not often explicitly drawing from social theory, the book is rich in theory through these many voices. This leaves the author’s own voice legible mainly between the lines.
A highlight of the book is its careful engagement with language and translation. Sottilotta not only quotes extensively from Italian scholarship in Italian, but also engages deeply with the importance of the Irish language and Italian dialects for these collections. She explores how language exemplifies the tension of island culture between preservation and global connection.
The work is situated in history, women’s studies, and fairy tale studies. This is a book for scholars about scholars, not a book of fairy tales. It is narrow in scope, but in that specificity, it speaks to a broad range of folklorists, historians, and to anyone working with culture at the margins, or on the contested histories of gender and class. Seekers of Wonder shows how folk and fairy tale study offers transformative, radical possibilities, not just looking forward, but also looking back at how we construct history.
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[Review length: 1032 words * Review posted on February 16, 2026]