By Andrew Martino
In the fall of 2016, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti wrote in the New York Review of Books that Italian author Elena Ferrante is in fact a freelance translator of German literature who has often published through the Roman publishing house Edizione e/o, also the publisher of Ferrante’s novels. Gatti’s findings were based primarily on an analysis of financial records he was able to obtain and that led him to the translator in question and her famous Italian novelist husband. Gatti claimed that
In an age in which fame and celebrity are desperately sought after, the person behind Ferrante apparently didn’t want to be known. But her books’ sensational success made the search for her identity virtually inevitable. It also left financial clues that speak by themselves.[1]
Since then, the backlash against Gatti has been extensive, leading me to interrogate the idea of the author as a public persona and examine what the global reading public believes an author owes or does not owe it. Certainly, the author, like anyone else, has a right to privacy, but the question becomes: at what point does an author, especially one of tremendous renown, sacrifice that right? Because of Ferrante’s monumental, worldwide success, as well as the mystery surrounding her “actual identity” (a problematic concept in itself), she has become a celebrity, which the writer behind the public persona that is “Elena Ferrante” had sought to avoid. However, it is precisely Ferrante’s inaccessibility that has increased readers’ desire to probe into her private life. In revealing her identity, Gatti maintained that Ferrante “asked for it,” indicating his little sympathy for Ferrante’s desire to keep her private life private.
Perhaps the most critical reaction to Gatti’s article came from Deborah Orr, writing in the Guardian in 2016 that “Gatti, as far as I’m concerned, has violated my right not to know [Ferrante’s actual identity], while Ferrante protected it.”[2] In expressing her outrage, Orr went so far as to call Gatti “an idiot,” also taking issue with the seemingly misogynistic attitude many have shown when it comes to Ferrante’s identity. Also in the Guardian, Suzanne Moore stated that “It does not matter who she really is. She is not accountable to us in any way.”[3] It is a telling and powerful statement that thousands of Ferrante fans (both women and men) have come to her defense over Gatti’s article. For most of her loyal and protective fan base her actual identity does not seem to matter in the least. And yet, the subject continues to be a source of curiosity for many journalists. Meanwhile, Ferrante’s US publisher—Michael Reynolds—and her English translator—Ann Goldstein—both continue to claim that they do not know who she really is.
Dozens of articles examining Elena Ferrante’s identity have been published, but none as revealing as Gatti’s. Many journalists have hypothesized that Ferrante is in fact a male, thereby totally dismissing the female voice from the work. Most recently, Joumana Khatib in the New York Times once again asks “Who is Elena Ferrante, really?”[4] Khatib dwells on the obsession with Elena Ferrante’s actual identity without taking into consideration her writing beyond a superficial summary of her output. She simply glossing over material we are already familiar with but provides no substantial new information. Shortly after Khatib’s article was published, the New York Times announced its “100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” featuring Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend as number 1. Although we are barely a quarter of a century into the twenty-first, Ferrante has become a powerful and resonant voice on the world literary stage, heralding a rediscovery of Italian woman authors such as Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Alba De Céspedes who preceded her. Additionally, new female Italian voices are enjoying a newfound audience thanks to Ferrante’s mass appeal, and other European women voices are also on the rise in literary translation, especially in English.
Ferrante continues to be a source of curiosity, which hopefully will drive new readers to discover her work and established readers to reconsider it. It is especially good news that the rights to an increasing number of works written in an array of European languages and translated into English are being bought by American publishers, although the American publishing industry still lags far behind in language translation. As monumental bestsellers such as The Neapolitan Novels emerge,more scrutiny will be placed on the figure of the author. However, discovering who is behind a text will not ultimately give the reader further insight into it. The author is not necessarily the text, just as the text is not necessarily the author.
In her thought-provoking study on Ferrante, Stiliana Milkova asserts that
The removal of the authorial biography de-contextualizes the writer, freeing her from the limitations of the local, the ethnic, and the national, and re-situating her within the broad literary realm where the foundational principles of literary narrative—plot and character, ideas and images, setting and structure—hold universal currency.[5]
Milkova’s claim here is perhaps the most insightful articulation on identity and Ferrante as an author. Milkova further argues that works in translation—i.e., works in wider circulation in translation than in their language of origin—constitute world literature. Certainly, Ferrante has become one of the giants of world literature in the twenty-first century, and her work has established itself as part of the canon of Western world literature. Responding to Gatti, Milkova explains that he “misses altogether the metafictional complexity and programmatic resistance to the image-obsessed media culture that inform La frantumalgia,”[6] She carefully unpacks the idea of identity—and more specifically female authorship—while also analyzing the relationship between identity and how people read Ferrante, as well as the ways in which her work is received by the general public, academics, and book critics.
In Elena Ferrante’s Key Words, Tiziana De Rogatis carefully examines “Ferrante Fever” through key words and specific aspects in Ferrante’s writing. She argues that using Italy as a lens has allowed Ferrante’s feminine voice to stir up a storm. “In a country like Italy, where male journalists, publishers, and professors consistently undermine women writers and their visibility, Elena Ferrante has chosen to stand with those women.”[7] Consequently, by upending the dominate male lens, Ferrante may not have endeared herself to the Italian literary establishment. By putting forth women’s points of view, especially friendships among women, Ferrante brings the female condition into the light. For De Rogatis, a woman’s standpoint is as authentic and personable as a man’s, and the complicated nature of Ferrante’s choice in not revealing her identity can be seen as a threat to the established literary scene in Europe and Italy especially.
We cannot know her true identity with absolute certainty, but one thing we do know is that during her two decades of writing in seclusion—from her first novel, Troubling Love (1992), to the publication and success of the first volume of the quartet, My Brillant Friend (2011)—she chose to make herself less prominent, not more.[8]
Because women have been marginalized throughout history, the question(s) surrounding Ferrante’s identity have become particularly sinister and sometimes mean spirited. This “dark side” of Ferrante fever presents a backlash not only against Ferrante but all women authors who dare to present an authentic feminine viewpoint in a world so historically dominated by the male voice and gaze. Ferrante’s eagerness to conceal her identity also in the text should place more focus on the text, not less. The “face” of an author is contained between the pages of the book written. Everything we need to know is there waiting to be explored. In her collection of essays, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Ferrante (through the voice of her translator Ann Goldstein) gives us what might be the closest glimpse into her writing process:
Imagining Delia, Olga, and Leda as first persons who narrate in writing—what is before the reader’s eyes is their writing—was important to me. It also allowed me to imagine—I purposely insist on this verb—the me who writes not as a woman who among her many other activities makes literature but as an exclusively literary work, an author who, creating the writing of Delia, Olga, and Leda, creates herself.[9]
“Elena Ferrante,” then, may be a pseudonym, but the author is also as real as others who write under their actual names, and we in fact know more about her than about most authors who allow their photographs to grace the back covers of their books and attend public events. It was through this pseudonym that Ferrante found the necessary freedom allowing her to imagine the worlds in which we have come to dwell. And it is through the writing of these texts that “Elena Ferrante” was in turn born.
In a letter to Sandra Ozzola (who, along with Sandro Ferri, is the publisher of Edizioni E/O and Europa Editions) collected in Frantumaglia, Ferrante claims that “I believe books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”[10] So, practically speaking, the question for Ferrante has never been about publishing, but about writing. This is precisely what separates the author as celebrity from the author as writer. Ferrante has always maintained that she has no interest in celebrity, nor does she feel the obsessive desire to publish; it is the writing that matters. In another letter, this time to Goffredo Fofi, Ferrante makes this clear: “I wrote my book [Troubling Love] to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner.”[11] Anonymity has granted Ferrante a freedom of expression that prevents her from being shackled to her books as author and enslaving her to their published status.
On more than one occasion Ferrante has stated that if her identity were to be uncovered, she would most likely stop publishing. It is uncertain whether she was serious in her threat. Hopefully not, or the world would lose one of the most original and thought-provoking literary voices to come out of Italy, a country that is “rich in poets but poor in novelists,” according to Italo Calvino. There was great elation when it was announced in late 2017 that Ferrante would be writing a weekly column for The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers. For several months during the spring of 2018, I looked forward to reading her Saturday column. Although brief, the pieces touched on everything from laughter and love, to fear and translation. Those columns have since been collected and published as L’invenzione occasionale—Incidental Inventions in Ann Goldstein’s English translation—with striking illustrations by Andrea Ucini, an Italian illustrator now living in Denmark. Not long after, Europa announced that Ferrante would be publishing a new novel, the Lying Life of Adults. Ferrante the writer, it seems, could not put down her pen, despite Gatti’s article.
It is Frantumaglia that offers us the most insightful glimpse into the mind of this very private writer. There, Ferrante often remarks on the process of her writing and on dealing with literary celebrity in an age where celebrity is ubiquitous—perhaps the greatest “secret” she lets us in on a writer’s relationship to what he or she reads. “Writing is also the story of what we have read and are reading, of the quality of our reading, and a good story, finally, is one written from the depths of our life, from the heart of our relations with others, from the heights of the books we have liked.”[12] Hence, to discover—or perhaps more accurately “to uncover”—the writer, the reader or critic should look more closely into what the writer has read. Ferrante has mentioned several books that have influenced her in some way, and careful readers—those eager to understand her writing more deeply—would do well to read those books instead of looking into the every detail of her daily life instead. What she eats or wears at the time she is writing is important only for those interested in gossip and in no way leads to a greater understanding of her books or of her as the writer. Reading Frantumaglia away from such mundane preoccupations reveals a writer who is generous with her time, is not all that reclusive, and is just as interested in the writing process as her readers are. What appears then is the true “face” of Elena Ferrante rather than the flesh and blood woman sitting at the keyboard. In this way, Frantumaglia is a fundamental text for those who are serious about her writing. The book strips away the persona of the writer—the writer as celebrity—and affords us an opportunity to search the inner workings of a woman who just happens to be a writer.
Does it really matter if “Elena Ferrante” is a pseudonym and that we do not know what her real name is or what she looks like? Does not knowing who she is really impacts our reading? Of course not. And, as I have been arguing, we do know her, and more intimately than we would if we knew what she looked like and she appeared at book signings. Anonymity gives one a freedom to move about in ways that are severely limited when one is moored to a name and identity. Toward the end of Frantumaglia, Ferrante declares that “we are a crowd of others.” Not only are we made up of those we know in our empirical existence, but we are also made up of the countless books we read and the characters we encounter in those books. In other words, we exist in the first-person plural. The first-person singular is a myth we tell ourselves to stake out an identity and to keep from being absorbed into the crowd. “The idea that every ‘I’ is largely made up of others and that the other wasn’t theoretical; it was a reality.”[13]
There have been claims that the questioning of Elena Ferrante’s identity is so relentless because she is a woman. Would a man face such a barrage of scrutiny? We have already witnessed this type of scrutiny in the case of Thomas Pynchon, to say nothing of the intense curiosity surrounding J.D. Salinger after he faded into the hills of Cornish, New Hampshire. But still, in the age of the #MeToo and Woke movements, we have become, and rightly so, more cognizant of the plight of women in the contemporary world. To date, only eighteen women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, whereas 116 men have been awarded the prize. I do feel that Ferrante has been treated unjustly, and I suspect that because she is a woman, some feel that they have the right to scrutinize her beyond the parameters of what is usually socially acceptable. Western culture is obsessed with identity and what goes into the making of that identity. It is commonplace today—a prerequisite in fact—that writers need a strong and active social media presence. However, in this age of social media, people hold, more than ever, multiple identities and multiple personalities. Whenever we truly engage with a book, that book becomes a part of us, sometimes with the realization that for the time it takes us to read its 350 pages or 550 pages or 1500 pages, the characters we live with become worthwhile and wholly real companions. While the dolls may have brought Lila and Elena together in My Brilliant Friend, it was reading Alcott’s Little Women that opened their intellectual horizons. After reading a book, we are richer for having had the journey; and there is no way to predict how it will influence us and possibly transform our lives.
In fact, for Italo Calvino (in “Cybernetics and Ghosts”) “…the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading.”[14] His exquisite formula for the literary life is as true for writers as it is for readers, teachers of literature, and book critics. Certainly, Ferrante is not as interested in publishing as she is in writing; and the writing that emerges from her is grounded in reading, thus connecting her (and by association, her readers) with an unmeasurable string of writers and their texts.
…writing is also the story of what we have read and are reading, of the quality of our reading, and a good story, finally, is one written from the depths of our life, from the heart of our relations with others, from the heights of the books we’ve liked.[15]
In short, the writing life is nothing without its counterpart, the reading life. Our influences, creative or otherwise, come from experiences we can locate, but most come to us unbidden, in unlooked for passages that lead us to new insight and depth. When we read Ferrante, we are also in the company of all those she has read and who have influenced her. Truly, the countless others make up the I.
Andrew Martino is Dean of the Clarke Honors College at Salisbury University where he is also Professor of English. He has published on contemporary world literature and is a regular reviewer for World Literature Today and Reading in Translation Online.
[1] Claudio Gatti, “Elena Ferrante: An Answer?” New York Review of Books (October 2, 2016)
[2] Deborah Orr, “The Unmasking of Elena Ferrante Has Violated My Right Not to Know” The Guardian October 3, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/03/unmasking-elena-ferrante-italian-journalist-claudio-gattihttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/03/who-cares-elena-ferrante-italian-author-anonymity
[3] Suzanne Moore, “Who Cares Who Elena Ferrante Really Is? She Owes Us Nothing” The Guardian October 3, 2016.
[4] Joumana Khatib, “Elena Ferrante’s Novels are Beloved. Her Identity Remains a Mystery” New York Times July 14, 2024.
[5] Stiliana Milkova, Elena Ferrante as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 5.
[6] Ferrante as World Literature, 8.
[7] Titziana De Rogatis, Elena Ferrante’s Key Words, Trans. Will Schutt (New York: Europa Editions, 2019). 22.
[8] Key Words, 22.
[9] Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2022). 50.
[10] ——–, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, Trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2016). 15.
[11] Frantumaglia, 59.
[12] Frantumaglia, 140.
[13] Frantumaglia, 365.
[14] Italo Calvino, “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” The Uses of Literature, Trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). 15.
[15] Frantumaglia, 140.
