Lydia Holland (Vivyan Leonora Eyles)

Daughter of the writer Margaret Leonora Eyles and Times Literary Supplement publisher David L. Murray, Vivyan Leonora Eyles was born in Australia in 1909. A few years later, the family moved to England, where young Eyles devoted herself to the study of English literature, completing her education at St. Hugh's College, Oxford. Little biographical information is known, but it is likely that Eyles became interested in Italian culture around the 1930s, when she met the professor of Italian Studies Mario Praz (1896-1982) at the University of Liverpool, where she was also teaching. After marrying him in 1934, Eyles followed Praz to Rome so that he could take over the chair of English Literature at La Sapienza (a position Praz would hold until 1966). The couple relocated to Palazzo Ricci, which quickly became a gathering place for intellectuals and scholars from all over Europe, as well as for artists attracted by the valuable works of art that Praz collected and displayed in their house. The couple parted in 1942, and then officially divorced in 1947. From then on, her relation with Italy deteriorated, partly because in 1948 she married Wolfgang Fritz Volbach (1892-1988), a German art historian who had sought refuge in Vatican City since 1933 due to his Jewish origins. Following the marriage, they settled in Mainz, Germany.

Under the pseudonym Lydia Holland, Eyles signed several works, including her novel The Evil Days Come Not (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947), and the English translations of Alberto Moravia's La romana (1947) in 1949 and Carl Blümel's Griechische Bildhauer an der Arbeit (1940) in 1955.

Although an unprecedented success, the translation of Moravia's novel is surprisingly the only one from Italian by Holland. The Woman of Rome was in fact published for the first time in 1949, in London by Secker & Warburg and in New York by Farrar, Straus and Company, before being re-published by various publishing houses, including Penguin Books, which in 1952 distributed the volume in the US, Australia and the UK. In 1952, the first Signet Books paperback edition was released by New American Library, followed by a reprint in 1958. The paperback version sold more than one million copies in the US only. Reaching a total of approximately 1,500,000 copies sold in the States, The Woman of Rome is the first translation of a novel from Italian to become a true bestseller - it would be surpassed later by Eco's The Name of the Rose - and represents Moravia's greatest success overseas. Nevertheless, Moravia's main translator remained Angus Davidson, who translated more than twenty books by the Italian author between 1947 and 1980.