When Jane Gleeson-White’s marriage ended two years after her mother died, she lost her voice. Books by women writers like Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson helped her find it again.
Half-wild Lyra from Northern Lights was the first female character who felt real to Jane Gleeson-White. Then she met Elena Ferrante’s ‘ferocious, filthy, quicksilver’ Lila, a more complex version.
The White Lotus is a tense, new drama about the lives of the rich and privileged, set in a Hawaiian resort. But the protagonists are not lying around reading airport novels.
Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn’t despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.
In her novels, in numerous articles and in correspondence, Elena Ferrante has chosen to depict the world from a female point of view. She has always claimed that the woman’s gaze is decisive.
Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has been called “one of the great novelists of our time” and her Neapolitan novel cycle “an unconditional masterpiece”. But the author herself remains an intangible figure.