Elena Ferrante’s novels are beloved. Her identity remains a mystery
Seemingly overnight, Elena Ferrante – or rather, the novelist writing as Elena Ferrante – found worldwide acclaim.
Her novels were everywhere: You couldn’t swing a tote bag without spotting one of her pastel-hued paperbacks on the subway, at the beach, in the airport.
The four novels that make up the Neapolitan quartet rocketed her to fame. Beginning with “My Brilliant Friend” in 2011, the books, which include “The Story of a New Name” (2013), “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” (2014) and “The Story of the Lost Child” (2015), chart the lifelong, charged friendship between two women in postwar Naples, Italy.
Readers appreciated the nuanced relationship between the main characters, Lenù and Lila, a delicate mixture of love, jealousy and abiding loyalty. Critics zeroed in on Ferrante’s intimate attention to women’s lives, both in the Neapolitan novels and in her other books, which many writers of her generation had not considered subjects of literary merit.
But as her star soared, fans devoted to Ferrante and her books confronted a stubborn question: Who is Elena Ferrante, really?
The Background
Ferrante has been publishing for more than 30 years and adopted her alias with her 1992 debut, “L’amore molesto” (later released in English as “Troubling Love”). With the appearance of the Neapolitan quartet, “Ferrante fever” began to spread, particularly in the United States, where literature in translation makes up a small fraction of popular fiction.
Ferrante has revealed some personal details over the years, claiming that she grew up in Naples, the daughter of a seamstress. She has implied that she is a mother, and married. Still, she has admitted to fudging the truth “when necessary to shield my person, feelings, pressures.”
The initial reason for her anonymity, she told her editors in an interview published by The Paris Review in 2015, was shyness: “I was frightened at the thought of having to come out of my shell.” But as she continued to publish, her justifications for shielding her identity became artistic and philosophical as well.
Ferrante is private, but is by no means a recluse. For a year, she had a column in The Guardian, and she also wrote for Italian newspapers. A book of her nonfiction, “Frantumaglia,” includes biographical information about Ferrante and extensive correspondence between her and journalists. In interviews, she has regularly reflected on her own work – her influences, motivations, states of mind – and, however paradoxically, her reasons for remaining hidden.
The Mystery
Ferrante and her longtime editor, Sandra Ozzola, have a close rapport. Ozzola and Sandro Ferri head the Italian publishing house Edizioni E/O, which has released Ferrante’s work for decades; by all accounts Ozzola is Ferrante’s gatekeeper. Ozzola did not respond to a request for comment. Europa Editions, which publishes Ferrante’s work in the United States, declined to make Ferrante available for an interview.
Michael Reynolds, editor-in-chief of Europa, doesn’t know who she really is, nor does he have a desire to find out. “I am completely uninterested, and have been from Day No 1,” he said in a recent phone interview.
“No one cared for 10 years,” he recalled of the interest in Ferrante’s personal life. And when interest surged, it was “a media creation – no offense,” he said, wryly. “It’s a great story for the media, but in most cases, for a large number of readers, they’re more interested in the books.”
Her identity is a secret even to her longtime English translator, Ann Goldstein, who has helped vault Ferrante to worldwide popularity. Though they have emailed directly fewer than a handful of times in the nearly 20 years that Goldstein has handled Ferrante’s work, the majority of their correspondence goes through Ozzola. “I’ve translated a lot of dead authors, so I’m used to having to figure it out myself,” Goldstein said.
Speculation about Ferrante’s true identity has centered on two people.
The Theories
Anita Raja – a translator and editor who has worked for Edizioni E/O – has been a leading contender at least since 2015, when an Italian gossip site noted, “There’s not a cat or dog that doesn’t know that Ferrante’s real name is Raja.”
The Raja theory, which had previously circulated in Italian literary circles, exploded in October 2016, when an Italian journalist named Claudio Gatti claimed in a two-part investigation that Raja was, in fact, Elena Ferrante.
Gatti analyzed real estate and financial records to arrive at his conclusion, and delved into Raja’s family history, including her mother’s survival of the Holocaust.
His reporting was published simultaneously in the Italian paper Il Sole 24 Ore, where he worked; The New York Review of Books; the French news outlet Mediapart; and a German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Ferrante and her publisher quickly dismissed the claims, which led to a swift backlash. Many considered Gatti’s investigation to be a needless invasion of her privacy.
“The stripping and parading of Elena Ferrante is violent and crude,” novelist Jeanette Winterson wrote in The Guardian. “Creatively it might destroy her (she has said she cannot write without anonymity), so it is a deliberately malicious act, too.”
Gatti was “burned” by the portrayal of his work and his intentions, as he wrote in an email last month. His investigation was timed to preempt the English edition of “Frantumaglia,” which contained biographical information that he believed to be false.
He was driven to expose Ferrante for several other reasons, he said. “The Italian media had openly named the Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone and his translator wife, Anita Raja, saying, in a very male chauvinist fashion, that it was most probable that Starnone was the author, while I was certain that the voice of the writer had to be that of a woman.”
He also chafed against Ferrante’s pseudonymity as a “marketing tool,” and believed that “the writer’s real background as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor was key to understanding her works (the protagonists in all of her books were strong women who had survived the toughest challenge, just like Anita’s mother).”
Years later, Gatti remains confident in his reporting: “I have never published an investigative piece unless I was certain of my conclusions. This is also the case for my article about Ferrante/Raja.”
Gatti also floated the possibility that Raja and her husband, Starnone, have collaborated to write Ferrante’s novels. Starnone is a decorated author in his own right, one of Italy’s most prominent authors.
Other literary sleuths have noted thematic similarities between the works of Ferrante and Starnone: Starnone, too, writes novels set in postwar Naples that often trace the complexities of marriage.
His book “Ties,” in particular, shares a great deal with Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment,” from the basic premise (a wife left by her husband) to more esoteric details: a broken glass vessel, upsetting episodes involving the family’s pets.
In 2018, two scholars published an academic paper that situated Ferrante’s work in the broader Italian canon. Using language models, they analyzed writing samples of 40 contemporary writers, and arrived at a clear conclusion: “Domenico Starnone, who has been previously identified by other investigations as the possible hand behind this pen name, is the author who has written novels most similar to those of Ferrante and which, over time, has become progressively more similar.”
This is a touchy theory; many of Ferrante’s fans are deeply invested in her being a woman, given her sensitive, nuanced depiction of female characters.
Starnone, for his part, seems exasperated by the suggestion.
“Let’s say I am Ferrante, or that my wife is,” he has said. “Explain to me one thing: Given that it is so rare, in this mud puddle that is Italy, to have international reach, why would we not make the most of it? What would induce us to remain in the shadow?”
The Final Word
In an email interview in 2014, Entertainment Weekly asked Ferrante: “Have you ever regretted not revealing your identity? Felt a surge of ego that made you want to throw open your window and cry ‘It is I who’ve created this world!’”
Ferrante’s reply was crisp. “Your image of the window is amusing,” she wrote. “My home is on the upper floors, I’m afraid of heights, and my ego gladly avoids leaning out the window.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
