“Cross the sea,” a young Grazia Deledda wrote in a poem to Americans in 1893, “and tell everyone that the island of Sardinia is still waiting to be discovered and known.”

On the 100th anniversary of her Nobel Prize for Literature, the powerful legacy of Deledda, like a literary apparition, is now waiting for American and the English-reading world to rediscover her works.

Hailed in the American newspapers in 1902 as the “George Sand of Sardinia”—though, George Sand never won the Nobel—Deledda’s role in Sardinian literature occupied its own realm. “Why should anyone feel doubtful about the future of fiction,” the American reviewer noted, “when young authors are rising every day, to show us the world as it appears.”

That world appeared very differently to the young woman writer in Sardinia around the turn of the 20th century. After elementary school, with the assistance of a tutor, she had published stories as a teen, much to the chagrin of her family, who saw such work as a scandalous activity for a young woman. Deledda never looked back.

Hailed in the American newspapers in 1902 as the “George Sand of Sardinia”—though, George Sand never won the Nobel—Deledda’s role in Sardinian literature occupied its own realm.

Her first novel, Fior di Sardegna (Flowers of Sardinia), appeared in 1892, at the age of twenty-one. “In the ‘stranger’s room’ of the Porru house a woman sat crying,” began Deledda’s novel, After the Divorce , questioning that “secret” in Sardinian life for women, five hundred years after Eleonora d’Arborea reigned as the de facto leader of the island. It was one of the first novels to deal with the theme of divorce, published in 1902.

She went on to write more than sixty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

In 1926, Deledda became the second woman in the world to win a Nobel laureate in literature for her “idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general,” according to the Nobel committee.