Considered one of the leading literary scholars of post-World War II Italy, she was awarded numerous prizes including the Premio Campiello for the entire body of her work.

For most of her career she was based at the University of Pavia where she established the Fondo Manoscritti di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei, an extensive curated archive of material on modern Italian writers.

[2][3] Corti's early academic career coincided with Italian Fascism and was curtailed by laws which prohibited women from holding university or liceo teaching positions.

After her mentor Benvenuto Terracini had returned from exile in 1947, she renewed her research collaboration with him and formed close personal and intellectual ties with his other students—Cesare Segre, Gian Luigi Beccaria and Bice Mortara Garavelli.

The first of these, originally titled Il treno della pazienza and based on her experiences commuting by train between her teaching job in Brescia and her home in Milan, was published in a revised version in 1981 as Cantare al buio.

Set in Apulia, the novel tells the story of a young orphan girl from Milan who seeks refuge with a fisherman's family in Santa Maria di Leuca.

At Pavia, she also established the Fondo Manoscritti di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei, an extensive curated archive of autograph manuscripts and other documents by 19th- and 20th-century Italian writers.