Bianca Garufi: Writer, Psychoanalyst, and Pavese's Muse

Bianca Garufi (1918–2006) was an Italian writer, poet, translator, and Jungian psychoanalyst, often remembered as Cesare Pavese's companion. Born in Rome to Sicilian nobility, she spent summers in Letojanni, near Messina. After meeting Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg at Einaudi's Rome office in 1944, she co-wrote the novel "Fuoco Grande" with Pavese, published in 1959. Their intense correspondence inspired Pavese's "Dialoghi con Leucò" (1947), where Leucò is a Greek translation of Bianca. Garufi earned Italy's first thesis on Carl Gustav Jung in 1951 at the University of Messina, becoming a leading Jung expert. In the 1960s she moved to France, married Pierre Denivelle, and published novels "Il fossile" (1962) and "Rosa cardinale" (1968). In 1970 she founded the Italian language and culture lectureship at the University of Hong Kong. She translated works by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Simone de Beauvoir, and James Hillman. A feminist activist, she wrote the play "Femminazione" (1974) for RAI. Her poetry collection was published by Scheiwiller in 1992. She practiced as a psychoanalyst, contributing to the Rivista di Psicologia Analitica and the Journal of Analytical Psychology.