Elena Ferrante: unmasked at last
“It is a scoop unquestionably,” said Stig Abell in the TLS – but what a dismal one. This week an Italian journalist claimed finally to have discovered the identity of Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous author of the quartet of Neapolitan novels that have taken the literary world by storm. In an era of “oversharing, where we know too much information for too little purpose”, there was something rather wonderful about Ferrante’s anonymity, which she has maintained for 24 years. “Her novels spoke for themselves; they had the elegant solidity of time and place, without the cumbersome scaffolding of biography to obscure them.” But now the mystery is over: Ferrante is apparently a woman called Anita Raja, who works as a translator of German-language writers for Ferrante’s publisher in Rome.
Ferrante’s fans are livid about what they see as an unwarranted intrusion, said The Times, but this secret was bound to come out in the end, given the success of her Neapolitan novels. The scoop didn’t come from “long-lens paparazzi shots but from straightforward investigative journalism”: the reporter, Claudio Gatti, discovered that Raja received big payments at the same time as Ferrante would have expected large royalty fees, and that, despite working as a lowly translator, Raja owned a $2m apartment in Rome and a house in Tuscany. Mysteries are fun, but journalists will always try to solve them. It’s not the end of the world.
But there was something nasty about this unmasking, said Suzanne Moore in The Guardian. Ferrante’s anonymity felt integral to her work, which addresses the “desire to disappear” and “the ways in which men humiliate women”. She once said she would stop publishing books if her real identity ever became known. So for her now to be exposed in this way, as if she were “a fraud or a criminal”, leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. There was no justification whatsoever for this scoop, said Robbie Millen in The Times. Novelists must be allowed to remain anonymous if they so wish, especially now that any writer who seeks to imagine themselves in the shoes of someone from a different race or social background risks accusations of “cultural appropriation”. The last word should belong to Ferrante, who, when once asked during an email interview to reveal who she was, replied: “Elena Ferrante. I’ve published six books in 20 years. Isn’t that sufficient?”