Person

Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante

The pen name of the Italian novelist who wrote My Brilliant Friend and the three Neapolitan Novels that follow it. Nobody has established who she is, and she has spent thirty years declining to say — the most thoroughly anonymous author the wiki holds.

Her stated reason is a claim about reading rather than about privacy: a book should be understood without the figure of its author clouding the reader’s mind. She gives interviews, by email, and has used them to fictionalise her own background — describing herself as the daughter of a Neapolitan seamstress, formed by a Naples childhood, one of several sisters. Whether that is autobiography or invention is exactly what is in dispute, because the Naples of the novels is so densely realised that its authenticity has come to feel like a credential.

The candidates put forward over the years, none of them proven:

  • Marcella Marmo, a historian of Naples, proposed on the strength of the period detail — which cuts little ice, since the books are not historical novels and the history is not their point.
  • Domenico Starnone, an Italian novelist and journalist, named by a stylometric study that compared the Ferrante novels with 150 books by 40 contemporary Italian writers and found his prose the nearest match. A variant has him writing in collaboration with his wife.
  • Anita Raja, a translator of German literature into Italian — Kafka, Christa Wolf — and the most-cited answer. It came from the journalist Claudio Gatti, who traced payments from Ferrante’s publisher, property purchases and other financial records. Raja was born in Naples but raised in Rome, and is married to Starnone.

Gatti’s investigation drew heavy criticism from Ferrante’s readers for unmasking a writer who had asked not to be identified; his defence was that she had laid a false trail about her own origins and that correcting the record was legitimate. Inside Italian literary circles, which are small, the Raja attribution had reportedly been an open secret for some time.

What follows from the Rome detail is the sharper question, and the wiki’s source raises it: if Ferrante was not raised in Naples, readers who value the books for their authenticity would feel that claim compromised — so anonymity spares her having to concede that the whole thing is imagined. Against which stands the position both hosts of that episode end up at, that writers should be free to write what they have not lived, and that in a publishing culture which signs authors partly on the strength of their social-media following, refusing to sell a version of yourself is a defensible thing to do.

In the wiki

See also