Finding Elena Ferrante: who wrote the Naples novels

New research reveals that Anita Raja, the mystery author of the bestselling Naples novels, wasn’t working alone.

Who really is Elena Ferrante?

Readers like a mystery. All publishers know that. When the author is the riddle and her books are a cult, they are on to something special. The four Naples novels by Elena Ferrante, stacked on booksellers’ shelves in airports and high streets around the world, are just such a phenomenon. The quartet tells the story of two girls. One is the narrator: smart, diligent Elena. The other is her “brilliant friend”, the dazzling, capricious Lila. Their tale unfolds across decades of loyalty and betrayal. Both escape from the slums, but one never really leaves it. They share passion and rivalry. Their men are rats. Their home, Naples, is a gift to the novelist as a scene for the drama, being turbulent, operatic and cruel.

For years, the novels drew a steady following in Italy. It was when they were translated into ­English that sales took off — more than four million copies have been sold worldwide. They touched a chord among women, among lovers of Italy and among readers who liked a long, flowing narrative with many characters and storylines. But who, critics asked, was Elena Ferrante? The name was a pseudonym. Reviewers wondered if she had lived the experiences or imagined them. How could her writing be so authentic? Had she really grown up around the mafia? Was she one author or several? Rococo conspiracy theories flowered. Could she be a he? Was her anonymity born out of fear, or trauma, or was it just a sales gimmick?

We think we know the answer to the first question, since the author’s identity was revealed last year. As for the rest of it, the Ferrante story turns out to be like Naples itself: intricate, contradictory and troubling.

Outed: Anita Raja; but is she Elena Ferrante?

Literary detection appeals to the Neapolitan mind. The city’s intellectuals live alongside crime, chaos and poverty. They are proud of its flourishing cultural life. Quicksilver instincts, plus a deep suspicion that nothing is what it seems, make them natural sceptics. The author continues to hide behind her pseudonym, despite being exposed last October as Anita Raja, 63, an Italian academic and translator specialising in German literature, who lives in Rome with her husband Domenico Starnone, a fellow novelist.

Raja’s cover was broken by Claudio Gatti, an Italian investigative journalist, who identified her through financial records with the virtuous air of one exposing a politician on the take. Gatti ­justified his exposé by saying that Ferrantehad chosen to lie, citing this line from her: “I don’t hate lies, I find them useful in life and resort to them when I need to shield my persona.” At first I thought that was a bit unfair. Then I found another quote, in a letter to her ­publishers dated 2002: “You always end up lying when you play these games with the newspapers and at the root of the lie is the necessity to put yourself before the public in the best possible light, with suitable thoughts for the role and just the right touch of blush.”

Gatti’s scoop left many of Ferrante’s admirers feeling that her privacy had been violated. The resultant furore just added to the buzz. In the midst of this, the ­foreign publishers released a book of essays, ­letters and written interviews by Ferrante called ­Frantumaglia (roughly, “fragments”), which in any other circumstances would only be bought by the select few interested in Italian feminist ideology and Marxism in the 1970s. It, too, is selling well.

“Are you kidding? That’s amazing!” exclaims Ann Goldstein, who has translated Ferrante’s works from Italian, when I tell her I have seen it piled high at a London railway station. In one way, Goldstein knows Ferrante better than anyone. In fact, she doesn’t know her at all. “Well, first of all, let me say, I’ve translated a lot of dead writers,” says Goldstein, laughing down the phone line from New York, “so in a way it isn’t that different. An absent writer isn’t different from a dead writer.”

Is it not extraordinary that Ferrante has never reached out to the person who transformed her from a niche Italian novelist into a global brand? Goldstein sighs. “I mean, in theory, I still don’t know who she is. My experience has been always through the publishers. The Gatti thing, I don’t know, they haven’t said if it’s true or false.”

It is not as if Ferrante is reticent. A torrent of opinion, often austere and censorious, pours from her pen in dozens of written interviews. It is just that she does not appear to like meeting ­people face to face. “When she began to give more ­interviews, I started to read them,” says Goldstein. “I assumed that there were some ­continuity ­elements that were consistent among all her ­novels — a woman born in the mid-1940s, but who had obviously read a huge amount, was strong-minded, sometimes impatient.”

In English, the voice that comes through is hard-edged; this may enhance the appeal of ­Ferrante’s flinty view of the gender wars for an Anglo-American audience. In Italian, though, the prose is softer, compromising, even dreamlike. “There are many things that get lost in translation, but my intention is to convey to some extent the style, as well as the content,” Goldstein explains. “Italian is a musical language, although I wouldn’t say that she uses it in the musical way that other writers do. It’s not elegant in the classical Italian way, but it’s very expressive.” She communicated with Ferrante through her publishers in Rome. The only feedback: “She said that she trusted me.”

To dig further, I go to Naples, where the grip of the Camorra — the local mafia that pervades the novels — remains a daily reality. “This is a city that has a continuous dialogue with death,” says Silvio Perrella, a Neapolitan writer who has known Raja and her husband for years. “Here, you live with fear. All the time you have to reach an accommodation with fear.”

I found Perrella after asking around among journalists and writers who all felt there was something odd about the Ferrante story, but couldn’t explain what it was. We were walking towards the Via Chiaia in the heart of Naples, an area that reminds you that if only more tourists would brave the city instead of rushing off to Pompeii and Sorrento, they would find a ­treasure house of art, architecture and style. ­Perrella gestures skywards, beyond alleys laced by washing, to a castle brooding above the port. “You always have to look upwards in Naples,” he says, “but have you noticed how in Ferrante’s books the people in the rione never see the sea?”

The fictional rione, or city district, where Elena and Lila grow up is likely based on a warren of streets between the city’s central train station and a jail. In the books, its people live in a virtual prison, trapped by poverty and acquiescence, ­bullied and exploited by Camorra gangsters. It is only when the two girls make a daring bid to break the bonds of custom that they glimpse the sheer blue of the Bay of Naples. “In the same way,” says ­Perrella, “look how in the books they speak Italian when they aspire to something, but speak in local dialect when there’s a crisis.”

Perrella points out two facts. One is that there is something incomplete in the biographical note in the novels that says: “Elena Ferrante was born in Naples.” True, but Raja left with her parents at the age of three and was brought up in Rome. Her father had been a magistrate in Naples and her mother, Golda Petzenbaum, was born in Germany to Jewish parents who fled the Nazis, found shelter in Italy and narrowly escaped deportation in the Holocaust.

The second fact is that it was Raja’s husband, Starnone, now 74, who grew up in a family of five children in Naples — as it happens, in the grimy tenements around the station familiar to ­Ferrante’s readers. Starnone, in interviews with the Italian media, has spoken of his abusive father, a frustrated railway worker who dreamt of being an artist. “My mother was dazzled by this domineering, persuasive, charming, violent man,” he told Io Donna, an Italian women’s magazine. “He never hurt us, but he beat her up before our very eyes. And always for the same reason — jealousy.”

The profile fits almost exactly that of Donato Sarratore, who in the books is the father of Nino, a clever boy who moves in and out of the lives of the two women. It is clear to Perrella that Starnone took a long time to come to grips psychologically with his decision to escape the menacing atmosphere of Naples. He did not begin writing books until his forties. The influence of Starnone, a ­longtime culture editor at the communist paper Il Manifesto, seems to pervade these pages. The question, for many, is whether “Elena Ferrante” is actually a joint venture between the couple.

“I’ve always suspected that behind the pen name it was Anita Raja and that her novels were the fruits of collaboration with her husband,” the veteran critic Goffredo Fofi told the Turin daily La Stampa recently. “I recognised the style.”

Ferrante published her first novel in 1992 and was already the subject of literary intrigue long before the Naples quartet. In 2006 Vittorio Loreto, a professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, ran a software program to ­compare early works published under ­Ferrante’s and Starnone’s names. He called the result “an evolutionary tree”, suggesting that the branches shared a common ancestry.

Last year, with 10 more years of ­linguistic data to work on, the Swiss start-up OrphAnalytics reached a more troubling conclusion. Using algorithms derived from genome sequencing, the researchers analysed patterns of letters, syllables, phrases and rhythm in eight books by Ferrante and five by Starnone. They found that while the first three Ferrante novels followed a common style, the next four — the Naples quartet — were different. There could have been two writers, or one writer who had changed style dramatically. Overall, they found “a strong scientific signal” pointing to one conclusion: the most likely author was Domenico Starnone. There was one hole in the data: because there are no novels by Anita Raja written under her own name, no comparison could be made with her work.

The data emerged just as the couple were ­reeling from the Gatti exposé. While speculation swirled around Italy that Ferrante was the product of a ghostwriter, she remained spectral.

Hints: Raja’s husband, Domenico Starnone.

One evening in Naples, I go to a ­literary salon in the gilt and plush antechamber of the Teatro Bellini, a 19th-century opera house. Perrella is there, and so is Titti Marrone, a writer and critic who says in her blog that she fights “negative ­stereotypes” about Naples. They have come to remember Fabrizia Ramondino, a political activist and writer whose novels captured local life with an authentic blend of characters and place that is, well, Ferrante-like. “Fabrizia based her characters on real people and you could even meet them in the village,” Marrone says.

At one time, there was speculation that Ramondino — who is almost unknown outside Italy — actually was Ferrante, but that ended when Ramondino died aged 71 in 2008, while swimming in the sea. However, one thing the writer said in her lifetime haunts me when I hear it at the salon: “I read Starnone with great attention, because he is known to write about women’s themes with particular sensitivity.”

There are more than a few ghosts flitting around Naples as I walk back from the opera house, thinking that here at least was a mutual debt and that the drowned author might one day be recognised as an influence on the famous one.

“Ferrante is a fairly mysterious personality,” says Titta Fiore, culture editor at Il Mattino, the venerable daily newspaper in Naples. “She has always been a very reserved person, not a ‘social network’ type as we would put it today.”

Fiore makes a more pertinent point, which I hear from others in Naples. While the unsparing portrait of the city in the novels is accurate, it is also dated. “Naples has a cultural and literary scene that’s very competitive, lively, always regenerating itself, so Ferrante was an important voice, but certainly not the only one,” she says. “The Naples in the quartet is the Naples of the 1950s to the present day, so it’s mainly women in their 60s who recognise themselves in it.”

As if in an act of defiance, last year Starnone published his latest novel, Scherzetto (Italian for “Little joke”), while declining to be interviewed about it. It is set, inevitably, in the dingy streets around the Naples train station. The protagonist is an illustrator in his 70s who returns to his childhood home to look after his grandson. The experience transports him to the world of his adolescence, “a continuous murmur of street talk, passers-by chattering, cries from the windows, gatherings on the shop doorsteps ... all noises echoing tenderness and violence, politeness and obscenity.” Folkloric, some might say.

I meet Luigi de Magistris, the city’s mayor, in the courtyard of the splendid Angevin castle that will be the city’s centrepiece. The Italian government has poured billions into a metro system, sponsored cultural festivals and renovated the old port area. He is proud of how Naples, once a byword for inward-looking deprivation, has taken care of thousands of migrants who have been ­rescued from the Mediterranean. “The truth is that our city has been able to rise to the occasion and give the right image of itself,” he says.

It can only be a matter of time before up-market Ferrante tours start taking devotees around the locations associated with her novels, with a security guard on hand. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things for Naples, neither her identity nor her authenticity really matter.

“As far as the speculation goes about who actually wrote the Ferrante books, whether they were in reality written by different authors or by two pairs of hands together, I couldn’t really say,” says Fiore, the culture editor. “What matters to the readers is whether there will be any more books. The story in the quartet is over, so there can’t be a sequel. We shall have to wait and see.”

©The Times