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Elena Ferrante () is a Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian language, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works. Time magazine called Ferrante one of the 100 most influential people in 2016.
Ferrante has kept her identity secret since her 1992 debut, stating that anonymity is key to her writing process and that "books, once they are written, have no need of their authors." Speculation and several theories as to her true identity, based on information Ferrante has given in interviews as well as analysis drawn from the content of her novels, have been put forth and routinely denied.
In 2002, Ferrante published her second novel, The Days of Abandonment (in the original version, I giorni dell'abbandono). The novel tells the story of protagonist Olga, whose life unravels when her husband of 15 years abruptly tells her he is leaving her for a younger woman. Olga becomes haunted by the visions of abandoned women she saw as a child. The novel was also a huge success with Italian and international critics. Critic Janet Maslin, writing for The New York Times, wrote: "Both the novel's emotional and carnal candor are potent. Once Olga begins seeing herself as, in Simone de Beauvoir's words, a woman destroyed, she begins a downward spiral that includes hallucination, terror of poison, and grim sexual self-abasement with her aging neighbor."
In 2003, Ferrante published her first non-fiction book, La Frantumaglia, which was translated into English as in 2016. The book is a collection of essays and interviews, and it was republished several times to include content on her following novels. In 2006, Ferrante published her third novel, The Lost Daughter (in the original version, La figlia oscura). The novel follows Leda, a woman who is spending her vacations on an Italian beach, and becomes obsessed with a nearby Italian family, especially with a woman and her young daughter. That makes her think of her own time as a young mother, and the existential despair that led her to leave her family for two years. The book was later adapted as a film for Netflix in the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal. In 2007, she also published her first children's novel, La spiaggia di notte (translated into English by Ann Goldstein as The Beach at Night in 2016). The book tells the story of a doll who is forgotten on the beach at night.
Elissa Schappel, writing for Vanity Fair, reviewed the last book of the quartet as "This is Ferrante at the height of her brilliance." For The New York Review of Books, Roger Cohen wrote: "The interacting qualities of the two women are central to the quartet, which is at once introspective and sweeping, personal and political, covering the more than six decades of the two women's lives and the way those lives intersect with Italy's upheavals, from the revolutionary violence of the leftist Red Brigades to radical feminism." In The Guardian, it was observed the growing popularity of Ferrante, especially among writers: "Partly because her work describes domestic experiences – such as vivid sexual jealousy and other forms of shame – that are underexplored in fiction, Ferrante's reputation is soaring, especially among women (Zadie Smith, Mona Simpson and Jhumpa Lahiri are fans)." Darrin Franich called the novels the series of the decade, saying: "The Neapolitan Novels are the series of the decade because they are so clearly of this decade: conflicted, revisionist, desperate, hopeful, revolutionary, euphorically feminine even in the face of assaultive male corrosion." Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic praised particularly how the books circle back to their start, to Lila and Lenu's childhood games, in the final installment. Maureen Corregan has also praised the ending of the novels, calling it "Perfect Devastation".
In 2003, Ferrante published , a volume of letters, essays, reflections and interviews, which sheds some light on her background. It was the first scholarly monograph on Elena Ferrante, a detailed self-study of her poetics drawing on Western literary and philosophical texts while also constructing its own theoretical framework. The 2003 original edition was followed by two expanded versions, in 2007 and in 2015. The 2015 volume was the first one to be published in English in 2016. In a 2013 article for The New Yorker, critic James Wood summarized what is generally accepted about Ferrante, based in part on letters collected in that volume, saying that "a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married ... In addition to writing, 'I study, I translate, I teach.
In March 2016, Marco Santagata, an Italian novelist and philologist, a scholar of Petrarch and Dante, and a professor at the University of Pisa, published a paper detailing his theory of Ferrante's identity. Santagata's paper drew on philological analysis of Ferrante's writing, close study of the details about the cityscape of Pisa described in the novel, and the fact that the author reveals an expert knowledge of modern Italian politics. Based on this information, he concluded that the author had lived in Pisa but left by 1966, and therefore identified the probable author as Neapolitan professor Marcella Marmo, who studied in Pisa from 1964 to 1966. Both Marmo and the publisher deny Santagata's identification.
In October 2016, investigative reporter Claudio Gatti published an article jointly in Il Sole 24 Ore, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the New York Review of Books that relied on financial records related to real estate transactions and royalties payments to draw the conclusion that Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator, is the real author behind the Ferrante pseudonym. Gatti's article was criticized by many in the literary world as a violation of privacy, although Gatti contends that "by announcing that she would lie on occasion, Ferrante has in a way relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown. Indeed, she and her publisher seemed to have fed public interest in her true identity." The writer Jeanette Winterson, in an article for The Guardian, denounced Gatti's investigations as malicious and sexist, saying: "At the bottom of this so-called investigation into Ferrante's identity is an obsessional outrage at the success of a writer – female – who decided to write, publish and promote her books on her own terms." Others have compared the unwanted publishing of her personal information to doxxing, and to a violation of privacy, something heightened by the violent language used by Gatti, who said she wanted it to happen. An article in Jezebel suggested that this was part of a general tendency to use scandal to eclipse the brilliance of women artists. Others responding to Gatti's article suggested that knowledge of Ferrante's biography is relevant.
In December 2016, Tommaso Debenedetti, a controversial Italian prankster, published on the website of the Spanish daily El Mundo a purported interview with Raja confirming she was Elena Ferrante. This was quickly denied by Ferrante's publisher, who called the interview a fake. In September 2017, a team of scholars, computer scientists, philologists and linguists at the University of Padua analyzed 150 novels written in Italian by 40 different authors, including seven books by Ferrante but none by Raja. Based on analysis using several authorship attribution models, they concluded that Raja's husband, author and journalist Domenico Starnone, is the probable author of the Ferrante novels. Raja has worked for E/O Publishing as copy editor and has been editing Starnone's books for years. Ferrante has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that she is actually a man, telling Vanity Fair in 2015 that questions about her gender are rooted in a presumed "weakness" of female writers.
| 1995 | Nasty Love | Troubling Love | Mario Martone |
| 2005 | The Days of Abandonment | The Days of Abandonment | Roberto Faenza |
| 2021 | The Lost Daughter | The Lost Daughter | Maggie Gyllenhaal |
| 2018–2024 | My Brilliant Friend | Neapolitan Novels | Saverio Costanzo |
| 2023 | The Lying Life of Adults | The Lying Life of Adults | Edoardo De Angelis |
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