In an early novella by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg—it has just been reissued by New Directions, as “The Dry Heart” (translated by Frances Frenaye)—the narrator walks into her husband’s study and finds him sketching. He shows her his drawing: “a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.” In other words, goodbye. He laughs. She doesn’t. “I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.”

About time! For their entire marriage, four years, she has cowered before him: “I was always worried about my face and body, and when we made love I was afraid he might be bored. Every time I had something to say to him I thought it over to make sure it wasn’t boring.” Eventually, he takes to sleeping in his study, though he occasionally calls her in, to have sex, and then, presumably, sends her out again. “Why don’t more wives kill their husbands?” the book’s jacket copy asks.

Maybe they will, because there’s a Natalia Ginzburg revival going on, abetted, perhaps, by the huge success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Before that series was published in English (2012-15), who, among the people you know, was talking about modern Italian fiction? True, people talk about Primo Levi (a new, complete edition of his works came out in 2015, under the editorship of Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s translator), but for reasons as much historical as they are literary. Levi was a prisoner in Auschwitz, and wrote our greatest book on that subject. But the rest of Italy’s stellar postwar generation—Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante, Giorgio Bassani, Ginzburg—have been widely neglected in recent decades.

Now, at least for Ginzburg, the wheels are turning again. This year has seen not just the republication of “The Dry Heart” (originally “È Stato Così,” or “That’s How It Was,” 1947) but also a new translation, by Minna Zallman Proctor, of Ginzburg’s more mature “Happiness, as Such” (“Caro Michele,” 1973). Another novel, “The Manzoni Family” (1983), will be reprinted in August. Most important, her masterpiece, “Family Lexicon” (“Lessico Famigliare,” 1963), was brought out by New York Review Books in a fresh translation, by Jenny McPhee, two years ago. There’s still work to be done, though. Several of Ginzburg’s books remain out of print. The only English-language biography I’ve found, a translation of a German book by Maja Pflug, is not in print, either. And it amounts only to some two hundred pages—this for a woman who lived and wrote into her mid-seventies.

It’s good to have “The Dry Heart” back, good to see what Ginzburg, whom few people encouraged to write, did at the beginning—quite different from what she did later. Ginzburg became famous for her ability to conjure up a mixed emotional atmosphere, poignant yet unsentimental. (Chekhov was a favorite of hers.) “The Dry Heart” is not very mixed. Although it is not without comedy, it is a cold, angry book. The main reason, unquestionably, is that it was written in the shadow of Fascism, a matter that, for Ginzburg, cut very close to the bone.

Born in 1916, Ginzburg came from a large, fractious, high-I.Q. family based in Turin, an industrial hub, the headquarters of Italy’s automotive industry (the flagship Fiat plant is there) and of Olivetti business machines. It is also an important center of learning. Ginzburg’s father, Giuseppe Levi, was a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of Turin. (Three of his lab assistants went on to win Nobel Prizes.) Paola, Natalia’s beautiful older sister, married a future president of Olivetti. Of her three brothers, Gino became Olivetti’s technical director, Mario a journalist, and Alberto a doctor. Natalia, the youngest by seven years, didn’t have much formal education; her father wouldn’t let her go to elementary school, believing that children picked up germs there, and she dropped out of college.

In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Turin was a hotbed of anti-Fascist activity, and almost everyone in the Levi family was part of it. Relatedly, they were Jews. (Or Giuseppe was Jewish; the mother, Lidia, was a Gentile.) They suffered for it. The Germans were not the only people in Europe who thought that opposition to Fascism was a Jewish plot. Natalia’s brothers were in and out of jail for seditious acts. Giuseppe lost his job at the university and had to move to Belgium in order to go on teaching. Natalia’s first novel appeared, in 1942, under a nom de plume, because Mussolini’s racial laws forbade Jews to publish books.

Most of the family’s friends were, like them, high achievers—publishers, writers, professors, scientists—and anti-Fascist and Jewish. But probably the most notorious Resistance fighter in this circle was Leone Ginzburg, an Odessa-born Jew who was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Turin. He was a leader of the Turin branch of the anti-Fascist organization Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), to which the Levi men belonged. He, too, was dismissed from his university position. Eventually, he stopped visiting the Levis’ house, because he felt that his presence there endangered them, but he obviously managed to see Natalia, because in 1938 she married him. They had three children, the eldest of whom is the eminent historian Carlo Ginzburg.

Leone, Natalia recalls, was arrested whenever an important politician came to town, and certainly whenever the King, Victor Emmanuel III, visited Turin. “Accursed king!” her mother would say. “If only he’d stay at home!” Finally, in 1940, Leone was sent into confino, or “internal exile,” meaning confinement to a town so poor and isolated that, in the government’s view, the accused could do no further damage from there. But Leone, in confino, went on doing what harm he could to the authorities. In 1943, when Mussolini was deposed, Leone decamped to Rome, to supervise an underground press. But after five months he disappeared. According to prison records, the cause of death was cardiac arrest combined with acute cholecystitis, a gallbladder infection that is often the product of trauma. That is, Leone probably died under torture.

From these griefs, suffered when she was just beginning to write, Natalia learned that unhappiness, though it feels quite powerful, doesn’t always help one write well. As she said in her essay “My Vocation” (1949):