Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonymous Italian author renowned for her widely acclaimed Neapolitan Novels series, which explores the deep friendship between two women, Lena and Lila, against the backdrop of Italy's social and political changes from the 1950s to the 2010s. Born in Naples, Ferrante began writing at an early age, inspired by a range of literary figures including Flaubert and Tolstoy, and later found her voice in the works of female writers like Elsa Morante. Her career began in earnest with the publication of her first novel, *Troubling Love*, in 1992, followed by *The Days of Abandonment* in 2002, but it was the Neapolitan Novels, starting with *My Brilliant Friend* in 2012, that brought her international fame. The series, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, received significant recognition, including a spot on The New York Times' best books list.
Ferrante's commitment to pseudonymity serves to distance her writing from the pressures of personal identity and public scrutiny; she prefers to interact with the media primarily through email. Despite speculation about her identity, including claims linking her to known figures in the literary world, she has never confirmed these assertions. In addition to her novels, Ferrante has released several other works, including essays on writing and a children's book, and her narratives have been adapted for both film and television. Her literature continues to resonate globally, reflecting complex themes of identity, womanhood, and the intricacies of personal relationships.
Subject Terms
Elena Ferrante
Author
- Born: 1943
- Place of Birth: Naples, Italy
Significance: Elena Ferrante is the pen name of an unknown Italian author best known for her Neapolitan Novels series.
Background
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous fiction writer living in Italy. She has been publishing novels since 1992. She earned global popularity for the English translations of her Neapolitan Novels series, the first of which was published in English translation in 2012.
Ferrante was born in Naples, Italy, where she lived into her early adulthood. Her mother was a seamstress. She is presumed to have grown up in the 1950s and is known to have lived outside of Italy for some periods of her life.
Ferrante’s youth was spent reading and aspiring to write, but she felt discouraged by an early anxiety about the validity of fiction centered on female protagonists. She worried as a young reader that only a man could be the hero of a great work of fiction. Her greatest influences in her youth were writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy, as she found many women writers’ stories were not bold enough for her tastes. She resolved to write about young women with the same dazzling characteristics she saw attributed to male literary protagonists. Eventually she also found female authors who inspired her, such as the mid-twentieth-century Italian writer Elsa Morante.
When she was thirteen years old, Ferrante began writing fiction. She earned a degree in classics at university. Ferrante began writing in earnest in her twenties, but at first had no plans to publish her writing, or even allow it to be read by others.
Literary Career
Her first novel under the pen name Ferrante, Troubling Love, was published in Italian in 1992. At the time of its writing, she told her publisher she wished to remain pseudonymous, saying that working with her would be inexpensive, as the publisher would not need to invest in promoting her as an individual. Troubling Love was adapted into an award-winning 1995 movie by director Mario Martone.
Her second novel, The Days of Abandonment, was not published until 2002; in the intervening time, she had written constantly but had not produced anything she felt worth publishing. The Days of Abandonment was made into a film in 2005.
The four Neapolitan Novels are centered on a friendship between two women named Lena and Lila living in Italy between the 1950s and the 2010s. The series, which comprises My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015), details the tumultuous political climate of Italy and the equally tumultuous personal lives of the two women it follows. Ferrante has suggested that Lena and Lila’s friendship is inspired by a relationship in her own life. She also found inspiration in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein was able to write about her own life in writing the autobiography of her partner. Ferrante developed the voices of her fictional characters, Lena and Lila, to serve a similar function.
The Neapolitan Novels were translated into English by Ann Goldstein from 2012 to 2015. While Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment had been successful in Italy, the English translations of the Neapolitan Novels earned Ferrante great success and global acclaim. TheNew York Times named The Story of the Lost Child one of the ten best books of 2015. The series was adapted into an HBO television series titled My Brilliant Friend in 2018.
Ferrante says her pseudonymity is not intended to protect her private life; it is meant to protect her writing from the pressure to publish. In October 2016, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti published a blog entry for The New York Review of Books that claimed he had determined, after a months-long investigation, that Elena Ferrante is the pen name of Rome-based translator Anita Raja. Gatti’s claim angered many of Ferrante’s fans. In September 2017, Jacques Savoy published the results found by a team of researchers who used different methods to analyze the text of the Neapolitan Novels and compared it to works by other authors. Each of the methods indicated that Ferrante was the pseudonym of Neapolitan author Domenico Starnone, the spouse of Anita Raja. However, Ferrante has not confirmed her true identity.
In 2016, two of her earlier books, the autobiographical Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (2003) and the children's picture book The Beach at Night (2007), were translated and published in English. Her next two novels, Incidental Inventions and The Lying Life of Adults, were published in 2019. Netflix adapted the latter into a series, using the same title, released in 2023.
The English translation In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing was published in 2022. This collection details the author's efforts to find her voice. It comprises four lectures Ferrante wrote that were delivered by actors in 2021.
Impact
Ferrante’s work has risen to popularity worldwide after many years of publishing to little acclaim. In 2014, she was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award for The Story of a New Name, as translated to English by Ann Goldstein. Ferrante won several high-profile honors in 2016. These include being named one of the Time 100 Most Influential People and being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Story of the Lost Child, which won the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal for literary fiction that year as well.
Personal Life
The enigmatic Ferrante has not revealed any significant details about her personal life, nor her true identity. She is known to have children and is believed to have been previously married. She has been uninterested in public attention and has consistently rejected invitations for in-person media events. Ferrante conducts interviews only by email, with few exceptions; in 2015 she granted the Paris Review her first known in-person interview. Her city of residence is not known, but she occasionally visits family in Naples. She has said that she studies, translates, and teaches in addition to writing.
Bibliography
Ferrante, Elena. “‘Writing Has Always Been a Great Struggle for Me.’” Interview by Rachel Donadio. New York Times. New York Times, 9 Dec. 2014. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Ferrante, Elena. “Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228.” Interview by Sandro and Sandra Ferri. Paris Review. Paris Review, Spring 2015. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Ferrante, Elena. “Women of 2015: Elena Ferrante, Writer.” Interview by Liz Jobey. Financial Times. Financial Times, 11 Dec. 2015. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Khatib, Joumana. "Elena Ferrante's Novels Are Beloved. Her Identity Remains a Mystery." The New York Times, 12 July 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/books/who-is-elena-ferrante.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.
Lewis-Kraus, Gideon, Meghan O’Rourke, and Emily Gould. “Who Is Elena Ferrante?” New York Times. New York Times, 21 Aug. 2014. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
O’Rourke, Meghan. “Elena Ferrante: The Global Literary Sensation Nobody Knows.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 31 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Savoy, Jacques. “Elena Ferrante Unmasked.” ResearchGate, September 2017, www.researchgate.net/publication/320131096‗Elena‗Ferrante‗Unmasked. Accessed 21 Nov. 2017.
Schwartz, Alexandra.“The ‘Unmasking’ of Elena Ferrante.” The New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2016, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante. Accessed 21 Nov. 2017.
Simpson, Mona. “Elena Ferrante Writes Fiction That Feels Autobiographical. But Who Is She?” New Republic. New Republic, 10 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.
Thomas-Corr, Johanna. "In the Margins by Elena Ferrante Review—A Window into the Writer's World." The Guardian, 20 Mar. 2022, www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/20/in-the-margins-by-elena-ferrante-review-a-window-into-the-writers-world. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.
Wood, James. “Women on the Verge.” New Yorker. Condé Nast, 21 Jan. 2013. Web. 24 Jan. 2016.