Becoming Concetta Brincat

The Summer 2026 issue of Treasures of Malta, No. 96, Vol. 32, issue no. 3, published by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti and edited by Giulia Privitelli includes my article on “Becoming Concetta Brincat” (pp.76-82). The article is a brief look at the life of Concetta Brincat (1870-1940), the first female novelist writing in Maltese and includes a number of photos.

This is the first part of the article:

Born in the area of Laqxija, B’Kara, in 1870 to parents who did not receive any formal
education and were unable to read and write, Concetta Brincat became the first known
female novelist writing in Maltese. She finished her novel set in the time of the French
Revolution of 1789, Il-Familja de Valereux jew Louis Mitluf ġewwa l-Bosk in 1919 and her second novel Is-Saħħara Nerelis, in 1922, a story set in the time of the Emperor Nero and his persecution of the Christians.

Despite elements in the manuscripts, like editorial corrections and the creation of a
pseudonym, and the determination of her female descendants to preserve and publish these novels that suggest that she intended to publish them, these novels never made it to the printers by the time she passed away in Sliema in 1940. I suspect that this was at least partly because she was a woman and that she came from the poor working class with few or no social connections in the predominantly male dominated world of publication.

I came across her hitherto unknown work in 2012 when I was approached by Nicholas Bonello, the husband of her late great grand daughter Desdemona, or Daisy, in 2012 to help in the transcription and publication of the manuscripts. Her first novel eventually came out in October 2025, almost a hundred years after she had written it in Sliema where she lived with her husband and where she brought up her children and instilled in them the love of books and reading stories.