Over the course of her distinguished career, Caroline Moorehead has created an oeuvre that is varied and yet also thematically coherent. As well as writing about trailblazing women – Freya Stark, Iris Origo, Martha Gellhorn and Lucie de la Tour du Pin – she has also focused on pacifists, refugees and deportees. Her books are scholarly and readable because she always seems able to find stories that combine history and human rights, female bravery and antifascism (or else nonconformity).
Edda Mussolini is, perhaps, a subject it’s harder to warm to. Benito Mussolini’s first child with Rachele Guidi, Edda was born in 1910, and her early years were marked by poverty, beatings and instability. Her father was very often absent, either at war or at work, in prison or in hospital. On prison visits, Edda was apparently taught to hug him so that he could pass his incendiary articles to his wife. She later said of herself: “I was barefoot, wild and hungry… a miserable child.”
Her parents enforced stoicism, banning any display of vulnerability, and as she witnessed repeated fights between them (invariably about her father’s infidelities), Edda became emotionally cool. Moorehead describes her as “mercurial”, “enigmatic” and “clever”. She had her father’s bullet eyes and stern features, a “farouche, defiant look”. “I managed to bend Italy to my will,” Mussolini once said, “but I will never bend Edda.”
Then, suddenly, she found herself – in her teens – the daughter not of a destitute fanatic but of Italy’s dictatorial Duce. Mussolini and Edda had a close relationship – she was very clearly his favoured child – but she was competing with hundreds of other women for his attentions. Far more than her reclusive mother, Edda was the “first lady” of the regime, courted and feted. By 19 she was married to a man who was himself a compulsive womaniser, Gian Galeazzo Ciano.
The couple were posted to Shanghai, where their vices became very apparent: Ciano repeatedly chasing women, and Edda drinking gin through the night and losing huge sums at poker. Ever stoical, she trained herself not to be jealous, and there was much gossip about her own flings and affairs. Ciano and Edda were the regime’s golden couple, but behind the fashionable facade they were the opposite of fascist gender roles: Ciano was indecisive, vain and lazy, Edda untamed and unmaternal – “a wild cat… wilful, rebellious, odd and restless”. She binged because she was smart enough to know the denouement of the regime was bound to be dark: “We must deprive ourselves of nothing because we know that the guillotine awaits us.”
Moorehead, perhaps wisely, doesn’t attempt much psychoanalysis, but throughout the book there’s an attempt to understand this mercurial, enigmatic character. She was always most at ease either thousands of miles from Rome, in China, or on islands removed from the mainland, such as Capri and Lipari. She was often listless, rising only at lunchtime after another heavy night, but was also energised by working as a nurse. She was at the centre of power, but was almost powerless. “That is the tragedy of the children of great men,” wrote one contemporary observer of Edda. “They are either imitations or wretched wanderers.”
Edda, it seems, was a bit of both. Restless and easily bored, she travelled widely, but often as an emissary of her father, to whom she was inevitably compared: she, too, was quick-witted, caustic, prone to digestive problems and violent mood swings. Eugen Dollmann, a German resident in Rome who joined the SS in 1937, said of her that she was “tartly intelligent, capricious as a wild mare and endowed with a thoroughbred ugliness”. Most of all she had “Mussolini eyes that irradiated everything and everyone they looked at”.
Ciano became Mussolini’s minister for press and propaganda in June 1935 and then, a year later, foreign secretary, a position he held for almost seven years. Ciano and Edda weren’t just a glamorous power couple; they were at the very centre of Italian decision-making in a crucial period of European history. Part of the pleasure of this absorbing book is observing a familiar story from a different perspective: we see both Ciano and Mussolini dithering while Edda herself urges them to throw in their lot with Germany: “This neutrality looks so like dishonour,” she berated her father. Edda, Hitler said smugly, “is the most German of all Italians”.
The narrative trajectory is something like a cross between a Martin Scorsese film and a Greek tragedy: the omnipotence, partying and carnal escapades slowly give way to feuding, executions and revenge killings. On Saturday 24 July 1943, at the 187th and last meeting of the “grand council” of fascism as the war was turning the way of the allies, Ciano voted against his father-in-law, who was duly arrested and imprisoned in the Abruzzo mountains. Mussolini was subsequently rescued by German paratroopers and installed as a puppet dictator in northern Italy, governing over the ruthless Repubblica di Salò. Ciano, in turn, was arrested and, despite Edda’s pleas for mercy (she accused her father of being Pontius Pilate), he was executed. “Mussolini himself,” writes Moorehead, “had effectively killed the husband of the child he loved.” (One of Edda’s son’s wrote a memoir with the unsurpassable title When Grandpa Had Daddy Shot.)
Edda fled to Switzerland, where she remained in hiding under an assumed name. She tried to rescue and sell Ciano’s eloquent diaries detailing years of negotiations with Italy’s allies and enemies. In April 1945 her father was arrested and swiftly executed. “In the space of 15 months,” Moorehead writes, “Edda had lost her husband, executed with the connivance of her father; and her father, executed by the partisans. She was 34, with three young children, all of them refugees, and she had no idea whether her mother, sister and two brothers were alive…”
The book almost concludes with the end of the war. There are two dozen pages about the remainder of Edda’s life: her heartfelt affair with a communist, her reclusive, though unrepentant, years as a “normal” citizen and the subtle maintenance of the family’s standing in neo-fascist circles, especially when, in 1957, Mussolini’s corpse was finally buried in the family crypt in Predappio.
It’s a testament to Moorehead’s precise, empathic prose that Edda emerges not as the Duce’s devilish scion, but as a wounded, fragile being. There are many piquant, rapid-fire adjectives for the characters in the story, but when it comes to Edda there is nuance and paradox: she appears not only an enabler and beneficiary of fascist crimes, but also their victim. It makes for a profoundly satisfying, albeit wistful, read and – given the recent victory of Giorgia Meloni in the Italian elections – a worryingly relevant one.
• Tobias Jones lives in Italy. His latest book is The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River (Head of Zeus, £25)
Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe by Caroline Moorehead is published by Chatto & Windus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
