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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Elena Ferrante

Ferrante Collage.jpg
Elena Ferrante's 'Neapolitan Novels'. Covers reproduced by permission of Europa Editions

Elena Ferrante is one of the best-known Italian writers working today, bringing the contemporary Italian novel to a global audience. She is known for her treatment of women’s psychology, her depictions of the city of Naples, and as a writer of the mother-daughter bond in 20th-century Italian culture. Her work has been widely translated, and has been adapted for radio, film and television, and theatre. The ‘Neapolitan Novels’ alone have sold 13,000,000 copies in over 40 countries.

Ferrante writes under a pseudonym, a decision which has been the subject of considerable controversy. For this reason, biographical details about ‘Elena Ferrante’ are difficult to come by and remain unconfirmed. From the snapshots of herself which she provides in various of her non-fictional writings, we can tentatively infer that she was born and raised in Naples but does not now reside there, and that she is a mother of daughters, studied Classics, had a prior non-literary career, and that writing has been a preoccupation throughout her life. Ferrante is deliberately careful about revealing biographical information. Her reticence is owed to a personal theory of authorship she has embraced, namely that the works of a writer should speak for themselves, without the public intervention of the author to guide their interpretation or introduce them to readers. On this topic she writes:

I believe that today it’s a mistake to fail to protect writing by guaranteeing it an autonomous space, far from the demands of the media and the marketplace. My own small cultural battle, now two decades long, is aimed mostly at readers. I think authors should be sought in the books they put their names to, not in the physical person who is writing or in his or her private life. (Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, 2016, p. 351)

All Ferrante’s work in Italian has been published by Edizioni e/o, a small Roman publishing house. Her first three novels ‒ L’amore molesto (1992), I giorni dell’abbandono (2002), and La figlia oscura (2006), now sometimes collectively referred to as Cronache del mal d’amore ‒ feature female narrators facing a crisis of identity: the death of a mother, infidelity and divorce, the transition phase when one’s own children become adults. Temporally concise and psychologically dense, Delia’s, Olga’s, and Leda’s stories stage a confrontation with a disturbed maternal past, a theme which Ferrante confirms as critical to her writing: ‘The roles of daughters and mothers are central to my books; sometimes I think I haven’t written about anything else’ (Frantumaglia, p. 251). Directly inspired by the third novel, La figlia oscura, in 2007 Ferrante published La spiaggia di notte, a short story illustrated by Mara Cerri. The tale of a doll abandoned on the beach at night, mirroring the doll with which Leda becomes obsessed in La figlia oscura, the book has a fairy-tale quality and is a children’s story, though some of the disturbing themes and nightmarish imagery may suggest that Ferrante is writing also for adults.

Elena Ferrante’s early work has been recognised by scholars of Italian women’s writing as innovative and exciting (see below Giorgio 2002; Benedetti 2007; Lucamante 2008; Sambuco 2012; Milkova 2013). It was also appreciated within Italian literary circles: L’amore molesto won the 1992 Premio Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante and was shortlisted for the Premio Strega, Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, in the same year. From 2005, the early novels began to appear in English translation by prize-winning literary translator Ann Goldstein. These were published by Edizioni e/o’s sister company in New York, Europa Editions. The Days of Abandonment (2005) was followed by Troubling Love (2006) and The Lost Daughter (2008). The translation of La spiaggia di notte, The Beach at Night, came later, in 2016, once Elena Ferrante had become a household name.

Though she writes pseudonymously, Ferrante is by no means anonymous: she has given countless interviews and has responded with candour to the queries of journalists and readers. In 2003, the first edition of La frantumaglia appeared, a collection of letters and interviews which is now a key point of reference for criticism of Ferrante’s works. In it, she details aspects of her philosophies of writing and authorship, and a vision of feminine psychic life which has become central to how her works are interpreted. The collection has appeared in two subsequent editions, in 2007 and 2016 ‒ the latter being released in English as Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey simultaneously with the Italian edition ‒, containing further correspondence, interviews, and discussion generated by the publication and global success of the so-called ‘Neapolitan Novels’.

The series of four novels, published in Italian between 2011 and 2014 under the collective title L’amica geniale and in English, also translated by Goldstein, between 2012 and 2015 as the ‘Neapolitan Novels’, became international best-sellers and sparked the phenomenon now known as ‘Ferrante Fever’. The international recognition was in part generated by a 2013 article for The New Yorker by James Wood, in which he argued that Elena Ferrante was the author of ‘remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels’ that deserved to be better known. L’amica geniale [My Brilliant Friend], Storia del nuovo cognome [The Story of a New Name], Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta [Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay], and Storia della bambina perduta [The Story of the Lost Child] detail the tumultuous relationship of two friends growing up in Naples in the post-war years, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, as they are variously united and divided by the game of life. The ‘Neapolitan Novels’ span over 60 years and allude to elements of the political and social upheaval of the 20th century. They also confront the central themes of mother-daughter relationships and female identity-construction which characterised Ferrante’s earlier novels. The Story of the Lost Child, the final instalment of the series, was one of The New York Times’ 10 best books of 2015 (The New York Times, 2 December 2015). Elena Ferrante was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2016 (https://time.com/collection-post/4299844/elena-ferrante-2016-time-100/).

As her popularity increased, speculation about Ferrante’s identity has become increasingly frenzied. Various theories have emerged during the years in which Ferrante has been active, but the peak of the controversy surrounding her absence from the public sphere came in 2016, with the publication of an article by Claudio Gatti for Il Sole 24 Ore claiming to have unearthed the ‘true’ Ferrante (https://st.ilsole24ore.com/art/cultura/2016-10-02/elena-ferrante-tracce-dell-autrice-ritrovata-105611.shtml?uuid=ADEqsgUB&refresh_ce=1). The report, of dubious ethical character, generated a considerable backlash, but remains a hypothesis. Readers and critics of Elena Ferrante were largely united in their confirmation that to seek to expose the ‘real’ author behind the novels in this way was not only an invasion of individual privacy, but a blatant disregard of the mode of authorship which Ferrante has adopted (see Alfano 2016 and Winterson 2016).

In 2018, Ferrante was invited to become a weekly columnist for The Guardian. These columns, accompanied by the illustrations of Andrea Ucini and translated once more by Goldstein, address topics including pregnancy and maternity, writing, love, fear, and death. The articles were collected in L’invenzione occasionale in 2018, which appeared in English in 2019 as Incidental Inventions. In them, Ferrante offers further brief glimpses of her personality and her life. In her latest novel, La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2019) [The Lying Life of Adults, 2020], she returns once more to Naples and to the perspective of the female narrator. La vita bugiarda is a stark exploration of the conflicted emotional life of a teenager, Giovanna Trada, as she struggles with the lies involved in forming a coherent identity and the hypocrisy of the adults who surround her.

In 2021 (17-19 November), she was invited to give three lectures in the prestigious Umberto Eco lecture series of the University of Bologna, which culminated in the volume of essays I margini e il dettato (2021) [In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, 2022]. Here, Ferrante provides further comment on her identity as a writer and a reader of literary texts, and on the manifold sources which have influenced her thought and style, from Dante Alighieri to the Italian feminist writings of the 1970s and 1980s. 

Elena Ferrante is an exciting and much-discussed contemporary author whose work continues to expand the possibilities for writing the female subject in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is pleasing to note, as Goldstein’s recent translations of Anna Maria Ortese’s Neapolitan Chronicles (New York: New Vessel Press, 2018) and Elsa Morante’s Arthur’s Island (New York: Liveright, 2019) indicate, that the global appeal of Ferrante’s work appears to be leading to the recognition of other significant Italian women writers of the 20th century beyond national borders.

Compiled by Rebecca Walker (Dublin) with Adalgisa Giorgio (Bath)

Bibliography

Fiction

L’amore molesto (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 1992)

I giorni dell’abbandono (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2002)

La figlia oscura (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2006)

La spiaggia di notte (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2007)

L’amica geniale (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2011)

Storia del nuovo cognome (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2012)

Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2013)

Storia della bambina perduta (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2014)

La vita bugiarda degli adulti (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2019)
 

Essays, Correspondence, and Newspaper Articles

La frantumaglia (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2003; 2007; 2016)

L’invenzione occasionale (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2019)

‘L’amica geniale e gentile di Dante’ (la Repubblica: Robinson, 24 aprile 2021, pp. 2-5)

‘“I have a lot of questions for you”: Elena Ferrante talks to Marina Abramović’ (Financial Times, 24 September 2021). Available online at https://www.ft.com/content/009042c7-efac-4003-a3b1-5945a0cf9270

I margini e il dettato (Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2021)