Invading Elena Ferrante's space

Literary circles have been in a tizzy all through last week over a New York Review of Books article by journalist Claudio Gatti claiming that Elena Ferrante, the Italian author of the celebrated Neapolitan novels, was actually someone called Anita Raja, known heretofore as the translator of several East German novels into Italian.

"Trashy expose" Salman Rushdie wrote in a Facebook post. "Pretty rotten", said Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste while Ferrante's publisher Sandra Ferri told The Independent that it was "disgusting journalism".

Much of the anger stems from what is being seen as an invasion of Ferrante's privacy, given how zealously she's guarded her identity for the past 24 years, ever since her first novel was published in 1992.

Anonymity has been integral to Ferrante's practice throughout her career, and she's spoken often enough of how and why it was so important to her. "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors," she'd told her publishers at the time her first book was published. "The media, especially when it links photographs of the author with the book, media appearances by the writer with its cover...abolishes the distance between author and book.... If one yields, one accepts, at least in theory, that the entire person, with all his experiences and his affections, is placed for sale along with the book," she wrote in Fragments (2003).

Given the delicate scruples that Ferrante speaks about, journalist Gatti's methods were about as subtle as a sledgehammer. The Italian freelance reporter based in the US got "anonymous sources" to give him access to the account books of Edizione E/O, Ferrante's publisher and also that of Raja. Edizione, he noted, paid Raja far more than the going rate for translators, and that large sums were paid to her in those years when a Ferrante book had been published, or translated into English. He then tallied this with records of expensive real estate bought by Raja, and her husband, well-known Italian writer Domenico Starnone.

Such methods may be par for the course for investigative reporting directed at uncovering corruption by politicians and big business, but not for an author who's said time and again that she didn't want her identity revealed. Ferrante's readers weren't amused. As Hari Kunzru tweeted: "Something's really gone wrong when we know more about Elena Ferrante's finances than Donald Trump's."

This, of course, isn't the first that the media has claimed to unveil the real Ferrante. Italy's literary circles have long speculated that Ferrante was either or both Raja and Starnone. Gatti's NYRB article mentions how a decade ago, a team of physicists and mathematicians at a Rome university used special text analysis software to analyse Ferrante's books and concluded that the author was probably Starnone. In March this year, the name of Marcello Marmo, a history professor in Naples, was bandied about. But the basis for that claim arose from a close reading of Ferrante's texts themselves — the claimant Marco Santagata drew his conclusions from the very similar educational backgrounds of Elena Greco, the narrator of the Neapolitan novels, and Marmo.

Gender perspective

Santagata's tools were literary; unlike Gatti he didn't pry into personal financial transactions. No wonder then that Gatti's expose has been attacked for being sexist, its vicious intrusiveness seen as a function Ferrante's being a woman and a huge success. As Bina Shah, Pakistani writer and New York Times columnist, said in a tweet: "Another woman stripped naked, metaphorically, by a man." In a Facebook post, Ophelia Benson, well-known American author and feminist, wrote: "It's a male journalist who tore away her pseudonymity. It's a man who forcibly took away from her her ability to remain private while publishing novels. I'm wondering why he felt entitled to do that."

The world of books and publishing has not been very accepting of women writers — the reason Mary Ann Evans chose to publish as George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Bronte (initially) as Charles and Acton Bell, respectively, not to forget Joanne Rowling as JK Rowling and Robert Galbraith. In an essay published in British news-magazine The Week, culture critic Lili Loofbourow wrote: "Naming is reductive. Naming affects how you'll receive a thing and the prestige and authority you grant it.... And women have been named and dismissed for much, much longer than men. As a culture, we have much more experience naming and reducing women — and their aspirations, and their behaviours, and their authority. So much so that doing it becomes a kind of reflex. Names do not contain truth; they activate scripts."

It is this, her reasoned refusal to be named, that has added to the mystique of Elena Ferrante. The author herself or her publishers haven't confirmed Gatti's claims. So for now the mystery of Elena Ferrante's identity endures.