“No one in my family was a publisher. My parents were originally from Trento and Ferrara, and my father was an engineer. At home, I remember my mother reading books from the “Medusa” [the translated novels from publisher Mondadori]. And then there was my grandfather—my mother’s father—who used to write fairy tale books”. Laura Lepetit moved to Milan as a teenager and, after finishing high school, earned a degree in Modern Literature from the Catholic University of Milan. At twenty-four, she married an industrialist and took on short-term teaching assignments: “just a few. It wasn’t easy to work and be a wife and mother at the same time”. In the 1960s, with her friend Anna Maria Gandini, she became a regular at the Milano Libri bookstore on Via Verdi: “That bookseller managed to convey the pleasure of reading. There was always such a wonderful atmosphere. A year later, he told us the store wasn’t doing well and he’d have to sell it. So Anna Maria and I decided to take it over. It all happened rather suddenly. She’d been working in the wine business. I’d been a wife and mother. But it felt natural. We brought together a group of friends and bought it”.

The decade from 1965 to 1975 at Milano Libri was marked by many encounters and surprises. “One day, Anna Maria's husband, Giovanni Gandini, walked into the bookstore and said he wanted to launch a comic magazine featuring Peanuts strips. That’s how Linus came to be. What amazed us the most was its immediate and astonishing success, especially since there was no publishing strategy behind it at all”. Between managing the bookstore, her work with Linus, and her family life, Lepetit also traveled extensively. “I went to the US, where I discovered feminism and came across publishing houses like Virago, dedicated exclusively to women’s writing. When I returned to Italy, I met Carla Lonzi, who to me was a symbol of Italian feminism”. This encounter sparked a deep interest in the emerging Italian feminist movement. She began attending the meetings of Rivolta femminile (Women’s Revolt), the group led by Lonzi. “When I discovered feminism, for the first time in my life I felt I was connecting with a new idea—one that genuinely concerned me”.

In 1975, Lepetit decided to found her own publishing house: “I had just read Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf and was surprised to discover that it had not been translated into Italian yet. I’ll do it myself, I decided. That’s how La Tartaruga was born”. That same year also saw the opening of Milan’s Libreria delle donne (Women’s Bookstore), with would go on to have a close connection with both Lepetit and La Tartaruga. Lepetit aimed to publish only books written by women—“a series of books that would show how women’s writing followed its own path, carried its own significance, and branched out into certain themes”—because “literature, too, is part of women’s thinking. That was the core thesis”.

According to Lepetit, publishing is a woman’s job: “Creating a book requires the same care and attention as raising a child—you have to imagine it, nurture it, guide it until it’s ready to leave home, and then anxiously follow its successes or failures. It’s the perfect job for a woman”. Through this work, Lepetit helped shape and preserve a legacy of women’s writing, assembling a mosaic of novels, autobiographical texts, and essays published by La Tartaruga: “texts that, in one way or another, reflected a certain literary ideal rather than being chosen for their specific content or the author’s fame. This was rarely the point; what mattered was that the work fit a certain canon that always included some familiar elements: exploring the nature of womanhood, the surrounding environment, the entity of social pressures, and the desire to break free from them. Essentially, it captured what is generally defined as the women’s awakening in the last century. Something women could also see themselves in. Even in the essays—the issues raised by the feminist movement are ones that, sooner or later, are faced by every woman: the search for self-knowledge and awareness, and the understanding of one’s own role.” “Meeting the authors is a love affair”. Through La Tartaruga, Lepetit published 276 books by 181 women writers: from major international authors such as Margaret Atwood, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Nadine Gordimer, Barbara Pym, and Virginia Woolf herself, to a rediscovery of Italian authors like Anna Banti, Paola Masino, and Gianna Manzini, alongside new voices such as Francesca Duranti, Silvana Grasso, and Silvana La Spina. Over the years, La Tartaruga’s catalogue expanded to include collections of noir fiction, science fiction, and essays (Lepetit was the first to publish the writings of the Diotima philosophical community founded by Luisa Muraro). Her publishing journey was supported by a network of close friends and collaborators, including Anna Maria Gandini, Martina Vergani, and fashion designer Mariuccia Mandelli.

With two children, four grandchildren, and several house cats, and a passion for feminism and publishing, Laura Lepetit has been honoured with several awards for her work. In 1997, faced with the constraints of an increasingly inflexible book market that left little room for independent enterprises, Lepetit sold the brand and catalogue to major publishing group Baldini & Castoldi. La Tartaruga—while still under her guide—will be remembered in the history of Italian publishing for its immensely significant role in the promotion of feminist thought and women’s literature.

Translated by Rebecca Cigognini.