In the Thirties she supports herself with the editing of degree dissertations and giving private Italian and Latin lessons. Later she will co-operate with magazines and newspapers, among which the Corriere dei Piccoli (children's newspaper supplement). Between 1939 and 1941 she works for Oggi. In 1936, in the house of painter Capirossi she gets to know Alberto Moravia, with whom she will marry in 1941. They will live in Anacapri at first, then Rome, where in 1943 she starts to write her first, great novel: 'Menzogna e sortilegio' (Lies and sorcery).

When the war is finished she moves with Moravia to an attic in via dell'Oca, whihc will become one of the most popular meeting places for Roman intellectual world. In 1957 she publishes 'L'isola di Arturo' (Arturo's Island) which wins the Strega prize . In 1959, during a trip she knows Bill Morrow, a young painter with whom she starts an intense friendship. In 1962 she separates from Moravia and travels round the world many times. In the same year Bill Morrow dies tragically, and this leaves an emptiness that cannot be filled in the writer, so much so that to those that know her she appears tormented by the idea of death and old age.

Themes that recur in poems from Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The world saved by kids). In 1974 'La storia' (The story) is published, and it will obtain an enormous success with the public. In 1976 she starts drafting her last novel, 'Aracoeli', which she will finish in 1982. She spends her last years in bed, unable by now to walk. In 1983 she attempts suicide but she is saved in extremis by a house helper. She dies of heart attack in a Roman clinic the 25th November 1985.

Morante is one of the greatest contemporary novelists. However, critics tend to forget her, in school anthologies she appears rarely and she is mentioned only briefly. Morante has certainly never done anything to make herself known, nor has she ever taken part in a critical talk about her works or on her personality as a poet.

If her opinion was asked about the social function of a writer, on her ideas or on her necessity to write, she would answer that everything that could be known about her, her ideas and her work was entrusted once and for ever to her books.

In Morante there is an anxiety to catch the order and structure of reality, for this reason her countryside are greyish, trees' leaves are red, houses the colour of the earth. The exact topography and quality of things is not just there to ensure the order of the world, which is appearance, but to place under comparison a definite space with the ephemeral, elusive and closed awareness of the characters. Characters that live a metaphore of life in the theatre: one of the most powerful themes of her narrative.

The sense of acting as a mimesis of the world. The game and the theatrical rite as a lie that encloses a truth. And in this nucleus the writer finds illusion once more, which she will call lie, ambiguity, reverie. Owing to illusion her characters can escape the conditioning of the world through the removal of the menace that is the coming into awareness of everyday reality. Deus ex machina almost always intervenes to save them: the written word, owing to which anew relationship with the world can be established.

Morante's faith in writing is absolute, as absolute are her positions with respect to the ideological void that has opened up with the degradation to repetitive schemes of her contemporary literature. The novel becomes the artistic form in which the author, through narration, gives her own image of the real and social universe she is surrounded by.

The search for Her truth, then, clicks in the language: the use of the first person becomes not only a modern narrative condition, but her way of filtering reality. The new language, sometimes slangish, sometimes falsely melodramatic, clashes against linguistic institutions, stating a choice that is free of all restriction. Even the irritating insistence of diminutives or names become central points of the new conception of novel.

According to the author, the technique adopted by a writer is not essential to set the degree of realism of a work: it is always absolute search for reality: "As every other live human experience, art cannot but feed itself of corruptible reality, which the writer must transform in a real incorruptible truth. This is the only reason for art: this is its necessary realism." (A duplicity without solution in 'L'Europa letteraria' (Literary Europe), 27 (1964, p.126).