The Difficulty and Intrigue of Getting to Know Elena Ferrante

One of the most buzzed-about mysteries in the literary world (a place, let’s be honest, that is not exactly replete with intrigue) was apparently solved this week, with the unmasking of enigmatic Italian author Elena Ferrante. Using a mixture of financial records, royalty statements, and other documentation, journalist Claudio Gatti managed to prove to the satisfaction of most that Ferrante, the author of the wildly Neapolitan Novels, concerning several decades in the lives of two girls from a poor neighborhood Naples, is actually a writer and translator living in Rome, by the name of Anita Raja. In other words, a writer claiming to be a female Italian novelist has turned out to be…a female Italian novelist. Case closed.

This being the Time of the Internet Mob—not to mention the herds of fans on social media who like to feel entitled to communicate directly to their chosen authors at all times and to receive immediate friendly gratification from them in the form of likes, retweets, and bland Twitter banter (precisely the sense of ownership and obligation Raja may have likely been trying to avoid)—everybody has an opinion about it. Many readers are outraged by the news, given Ferrante’s obvious desire for privacy and her unwillingness to play the fame game. (Her desire for anonymity, in fact, was virtually her only known biographical information.) Others have—wrongly—compared her to literary hoaxes like J.T. LeRoy, despite the fact that LeRoy was a persona, a person pretending to be another person based on the fictional events of his real life, and desperately sought attention, celebrity friendships, and fame; Elena Ferrante is simply a pen name. This discovery, wrote Adam Kirsch, “was more like a criminal investigation than literary criticism.”

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