Despite being recognized as a novelist on an international scale,[21] Ferrante has kept her identity secret since the 1992 publication of her first novel.[22] Speculation as to her true identity has been rife, and several theories, based on information Ferrante has given in interviews as well as analysis drawn from the content of her novels, have been put forth.
Ferrante holds that "books, once they are written, have no need of their authors."[4] She has repeatedly argued that anonymity is a precondition for her work[23] and that keeping her true name out of the spotlight is key to her writing process.[24] According to Ferrante,[25]
Once I knew that the completed book would make its way in the world without me, once I knew that nothing of the concrete, physical me would ever appear beside the volume—as if the book were a little dog and I were its master—it made me see something new about writing. I felt as though I had released the words from myself.[22]
In 2003, Ferrante published Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey, a volume of letters, essays, reflections and interviews, which sheds some light on her background. It was the first scholarly monograph on Elena Ferrante, a detailed (self-)study of her poetics drawing on Western literary and philosophical texts while also constructing its own theoretical framework.[15] The 2003 original edition was followed by two expanded versions, in 2007 and in 2015. The 2015 volume was the first one to be published in English in 2016.[15] In a 2013 article for The New Yorker, critic James Wood summarized what is generally accepted about Ferrante, based in part on letters collected in that volume:
a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married ... In addition to writing, "I study, I translate, I teach."[4]
In March 2016, Marco Santagata, an Italian novelist and philologist, a scholar of Petrarch and Dante, and a professor at the University of Pisa,[26] published a paper detailing his theory of Ferrante's identity. Santagata's paper drew on philological analysis of Ferrante's writing, close study of the details about the cityscape of Pisa described in the novel, and the fact that the author reveals an expert knowledge of modern Italian politics. Based on this information, he concluded that the author had lived in Pisa but left by 1966, and therefore identified the probable author as Neapolitan professor Marcella Marmo, who studied in Pisa from 1964 to 1966. Both Marmo and the publisher deny Santagata's identification.[1]
In October 2016, investigative reporter Claudio Gatti published an article jointly in Il Sole 24 Ore and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that relied on financial records related to real estate transactions and royalties payments to draw the conclusion that Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator, is the real author behind the Ferrante pseudonym.[27] Gatti's article was criticized by many in the literary world as a violation of privacy,[23][28][29] though Gatti contends that "by announcing that she would lie on occasion, Ferrante has in a way relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown. Indeed, she and her publisher seemed to have fed public interest in her true identity."[23] The writer Jeanette Winterson, in a Guardian article, denounced Gatti's investigations as malicious and sexist, saying "At the bottom of this so-called investigation into Ferrante's identity is an obsessional outrage at the success of a writer – female – who decided to write, publish and promote her books on her own terms."[30] Others have compared the unwanted publishing of her personal information to doxxing,[31] and to a violation of privacy,[32] something heightened by the violent language used by Gatti, who said she wanted it to happen.[33] An article in Jezebel suggested that this was part of a general tendency to use scandal to eclipse the brilliance of women artists.[34] Others responding to Gatti's article suggested that knowledge of Ferrante's biography is indeed relevant.[35]
In December 2016, the controversial Italian prankster[36] Tommaso Debenedetti published on the website of the Spanish daily El Mundo a purported interview with Raja confirming she was Elena Ferrante.[37] This was quickly denied by Ferrante's publisher, who called the interview a fake.[38]
In September 2017, a team of scholars, computer scientists, philologists and linguists at the University of Padua analyzed 150 novels written in Italian by 40 different authors, including seven books by Elena Ferrante, but none by Raja. Based on analysis using several authorship attribution models, they concluded that Anita Raja's husband, author and journalist Domenico Starnone, is the probable author of the Ferrante novels.[39] Raja has worked for E/O Publishing as copy editor and has been editing Starnone's books for years.
Ferrante has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that she is actually a man, telling Vanity Fair in 2015 that questions about her gender are rooted in a presumed "weakness" of female writers.[40]
