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). The books’ taglines might be “No self can be left behind”: in Ferrante’s world, no character can escape her past.
Shaken by a surprising event, they lose their grip on reality, lapse into a Neapolitan dialect full of obscenities, and are drawn into hallucinatory quests to heal old emotional injuries. ( Six are now available in English, all exquisitely translated by Ann Goldstein, an editor at the New Yorker.) Ferrante’s project is bold: her books chronicle the inner conflicts of intelligent women (professors, novelists) who, having made their way to Florence or Rome and to good jobs, find themselves confronting memories of the crude violence and misogyny of their youth. That absolute creative freedom has resulted in a series of brilliant novels. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers if not, they won’t.” Anonymity, she thought, would preserve “a space of absolute creative freedom”, a freedom all the more necessary because her books stick “a finger in certain wounds I have that are still infected”. In 1991, shortly before the publication of her style-defining first book, Troubling Love, Ferrante sent a letter to her editor, explaining that she would not be promoting it: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. She refuses face-to-face interviews, has only given a handful of written ones (a few of her letters have been published), and makes no personal appearances no photographs of her have been published.
In our self-promoting, Twitter-saturated age, Ferrante is an outlier, an author who wishes to remain totally private. She seems once to have been married she may have lived in Greece she appears to be a mother. Elena Ferrante is an Italian novelist who was born in or near Naples.
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