tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/elena-ferrante-20079/articlesElena Ferrante – The Conversation2023-10-19T19:03:10Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2074242023-10-19T19:03:10Z2023-10-19T19:03:10ZFriday essay: how women writers helped me find my voice after divorce<p>When my 25-year marriage broke down in 2017, I did what I always do in my life, especially in times of crisis. I turned to books. Specifically, to books by women. </p>
<p>Many, but not all of them, were in middle age, writing about their lives post-husbands – often post-intensive mothering too. They’d arrived at an unmarked place. There were no literary or narrative models to follow, in their lives or in their art. So they were making them up as they went.</p>
<p>My hunger for women’s voices was amplified by having spent a decade reading and listening almost exclusively to men, for the <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Jane-Gleeson-White-Double-Entry-9781743311554">books</a> I <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Jane-Gleeson-White-Six-Capitals-Updated-Edition-9781760876784/">wrote</a> on accounting.</p>
<p>I had no plan; it was an impulsive, almost life-saving need. The first book I picked up was an old favourite, Jane Austen’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/persuasion-9780141439686">Persuasion</a>. In the slow unfolding of her final novel, Austen subjects her readers to the exquisite agony of watching its heroine Anne Elliott suffer a great and apparently hopeless love for her former suitor. Anne is gentle, reserved and bookish. But when moved, she’s passionate – outspoken about the force of women’s emotions, and inequality of opportunity:</p>
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<p>Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.</p>
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<p>Persuasion acted like a tuning fork, returning me to my bookish self. The self who’d made a blog called bookishgirl in 2010, before we’d both – blog and girl – become mired in stories written by men: economics and accounting, both <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/01/what-really-counts-how-the-patriarchy-of-economics-finally-tore-me-apart">blind to the value of nature and women</a>.</p>
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<span class="caption">After Jane Gleeson-White’s marriage broke down, she did what she always does in times of crisis and turned to books.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Pauline Futeran</span></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/exes-alcohol-and-loose-historical-licence-why-netflixs-persuasion-is-jane-austen-via-fleabag-185383">Exes, alcohol and loose historical licence: why Netflix's Persuasion is Jane Austen via Fleabag</a>
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<h2>Literary motherline</h2>
<p>Claiming her literary motherline is one of the impulses behind British writer Joanna Biggs’s new memoir <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/joanna-biggs/a-life-of-ones-own-nine-women-writers-begin-again">A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again</a>. Much as I did, Biggs turned to women writers to answer the many questions thrown up by her divorce – and her book is the result of this reading. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tbyhlq8DUs">an interview with Lizzie Simon</a>, Biggs says many people have asked about her decision to write in this hybrid form: part memoir, part biographical essays and part literary criticism. </p>
<p>But Biggs didn’t decide it. The form grew organically from a particular moment in her life, when she was <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/joanna-biggs">writing for the London Review of Books</a> and experimenting with adding more memoir to her reviews, inspired by the autofiction of writers like <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dying-earth-and-a-lament-for-lost-fathers-sheila-heti-strips-back-the-novel-and-makes-it-new-181938">Sheila Heti</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-execrable-to-memorable-ben-lerners-essay-on-the-hatred-of-poetry-63413">Ben Lerner</a>. </p>
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<p>Biggs looks backwards, partly prompted by books her mother has given her and partly returning to writers she’s loved – Mary Wollstonecraft, <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-george-eliot-200-years-on-a-scandalous-life-a-brilliant-mind-and-a-huge-literary-legacy-127438">George Eliot</a>, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir – and reads <a href="https://www.zoranealehurston.com/">Zora Neale Hurston</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-most-influential-american-author-of-her-generation-toni-morrisons-writing-was-radically-ambiguous-121557">Toni Morrison</a> for the first time. </p>
<p>In her last chapter, she turns to the present, reading <a href="https://theconversation.com/true-writing-is-a-convulsive-act-inside-the-mind-of-elena-ferrante-180311">Elena Ferrante</a> as her novels storm the world – then rereading the Neapolitan quartet with friends.</p>
<p>Each chapter is devoted to an author, but their lives spill over into each other’s, creating themes that resonate with Biggs’s own experiences:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I watched them try to answer some of the questions I had. This book bears the traces of their struggles as well as my own – and some of the things we all found that help.</p>
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<p>Biggs turns to these women not just to find new ways to live, but also to learn new modes of writing and reading. Having studied English and French literature at Oxford University, she’s trained herself out of reading with her emotions and into the “objective” reading of scholarship. Now she’s undoing that by allowing herself to read with her whole self fully engaged – the same way she’s learning to live.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-fictional-character-ill-never-forget-these-half-wild-too-much-heroines-philip-pullmans-lyra-and-elena-ferrantes-lila-186196">My favourite fictional character: I'll never forget these half-wild, 'too much' heroines – Philip Pullman's Lyra and Elena Ferrante's Lila</a>
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<h2>Women writers in flux</h2>
<p>After reading Persuasion, I realised I wasn’t interested in the past. I wanted to know how and what women were writing now, especially about themselves in flux – at a time when marriage and all the inherited structures of our lives seem as stricken and prone to collapse as the world around us.</p>
<p>I quickly discovered I couldn’t have had a more readily satisfied desire. In terms of my reading life, I was in the best of all possible worlds. I read everything I could find by <a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-fictional-character-ill-never-forget-these-half-wild-too-much-heroines-philip-pullmans-lyra-and-elena-ferrantes-lila-186196">Elena Ferrante</a>, Maggie Nelson, <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dying-earth-and-a-lament-for-lost-fathers-sheila-heti-strips-back-the-novel-and-makes-it-new-181938">Sheila Heti</a> and Anne Carson. I read lots of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Olivia Laing, among so many others.</p>
<p>Unlike Biggs, who in 2020 decided to read a book a week to combat her depression and created what she endearingly calls an “embarrassing spreadsheet” to keep track of it, there was no structure to my reading. But I seemed to be guided to books that spoke to my many challenges as I moved beyond my marriage. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">‘I read lots of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Olivia Laing.’ Pictured: Rachel Cusk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Siemon Scamell Katz</span></span>
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<p>In 2017, soon after my husband moved out and I was ostensibly free, I wrote on a psychologist’s form: <em>I can’t find my voice. I cannot speak.</em> </p>
<p>What is your problem? it asked. <em>I cannot say I</em>, I replied. </p>
<p>Given I was an experienced writer in midlife, it felt bewildering and shameful to have to confess this. The person I’d been had written in a cool, objective voice, which was regularly remarked upon by male correspondents:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have by chance come across your book and have to write to say what a marvel it is […] It is totally objective (typically, now, books often seem to remind the reader who the author is, and what he/she is experiencing – as if we care!).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But suddenly what the author was experiencing was all I cared about. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/things-i-dont-want-to-know-9780241983089">Things I Don’t Want to Know</a>, Deborah Levy spoke straight to my turmoil. It takes repeated acts of will, as a woman, to learn to say I, she writes.</p>
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<p>It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject; it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Things I Don’t Want to Know is the first iteration of Levy’s “living autobiography”, a form she invented for writing her life while still living it, catching it on the wing as she travelled through her days after ending her own long marriage. </p>
<p>Reading Levy, I began to understand that for a woman, saying “I” was not a given. It was a learned skill. I had to practise it, to will it repeatedly. Levy was not the only author who shed light on my confounding experience.</p>
<p>Anne Carson is illuminating on the leaden weight of history stacked against the female voice. In her essay <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/46037885">The Gender of Sound</a>, she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. The high pitched and horrendous voices of the ancient female furies are compared by Aeschylus to howling dogs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s as if the entire female gender “were a kind of collective bad memory of unspeakable things”, which the patriarchal order feels obliged to channel into politically correct containers. Freud believed “a thinking man” is his own legislator and obtains his own absolution. But a woman does not have </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the measure of ethics in herself. She can only act if she keeps within the limits of morality, following what society has established as fitting.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So in ways that became very real for me, I learnt that to speak as a woman is to transgress.</p>
<h2>Transgression and transition</h2>
<p>Transgression is key to Maggie Nelson’s creative practice. In <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-argonauts">The Argonauts</a>, her breakthrough work of creative nonfiction, she borrows poet Eileen Myles’s idea of a poem as a party to make a literary form mutable enough to convey transfiguration. </p>
<p>Notably, her own transition from pregnancy to new motherhood; and her partner Harry Dodge’s transition through injecting testosterone as he prepares for, undergoes and recovers from top surgery.</p>
<p>At her party on the page, Nelson gathers people who’d never be seen together in real life and sits them beside each other, so they must converse. You feel its electrifying force from the opening page, where she juxtaposes a tryst with her new lover, Dodge, with <a href="https://theconversation.com/wittgenstein-tried-to-solve-all-the-problems-of-philosophy-in-his-tractatus-logico-philosophicus-but-he-didnt-quite-succeed-181719">philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.</p>
<p>Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained – inexpressibly! – in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.</p>
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<span class="caption">Maggie Nelson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2016/maggie-nelson#searchresults">John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Olivia Laing does something similar in her memoir-in-essays, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Olivia-Laing-Lonely-City-9781782111252/">The Lonely City</a>, in which she charts her own season of liminality after a breakup, via conversations with the art and lives of others. </p>
<p>Suddenly alone in New York City after the man she’s moved there for changes his mind, she makes loneliness her subject. In the absence of love, she finds solace and communion in the city itself, and in the work and lives of artists. It’s here, in visual art and its associated materials (letters, manuscripts, archives) that she begins to find company in her chronic isolation.</p>
<p>I came to The Lonely City at a particularly lonely moment in my own life: April 2020, when all the casual dates, spontaneous beers, snap decisions to eat at my corner bar vanished, all suddenly forbidden by Sydney’s lockdown laws. </p>
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<p>Laing’s opening pages, where she introduces her subject and her own uncomfortable immersion in it, reverberate with such raw pain and fathomless need, I found them almost too distressing to read. </p>
<p>But Laing’s prose flows seamlessly as she crawls through the endless days, her mind wandering, alighting on a new theme, a new artist. And each artist brings with them a community of friends, collaborators, lovers and/or kindred spirits, and characters recur – so it weaves together like an all night party on the Lower East Side, paradoxically becoming immensely companionable.</p>
<h2>‘Searching for a missing female character’</h2>
<p>It seems important to speak of new forms now, especially for women, in life as well as art, because these conversations are everywhere. I’ve talked to an army of women in similar situations since my marriage broke down. They speak of their broken hearts, ruined futures, crushing loneliness, rage. Some are looking for work, housing, sex or love; others for reinvention, adventure, freedom, meaning. Or all of the above.</p>
<p>Most of us are working out how or who we might be beyond our relationships with others, mostly men. And some of us are wondering how to write our newly visible protean selves, entangled in a world that feels distressed in every realm.</p>
<p>Like Levy, it seems we’re all “still searching for a missing female character”. As she asks in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/real-estate-9780241993866">Real Estate</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Who is she? That is the question I was starting to ask in all my books. Not who am I, though that comes into it. How does she get along in the world that voided her?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite six years of living, reading and writing since my divorce, my subject – or perhaps my subjectivity – is still not quite clear to me. In ways I can’t gloss over, my life and my writing remain uncertain. Messy.</p>
<p>In the early hours, this unknowing can still feel perilous, shameful, especially given I’m a grown woman with two adult children. Soon after I began writing this essay, I woke from a nightmare at 5am with these words in my head, spoken from the future:</p>
<p><em>What did you do as the world burned and we ran out of diesel and food?</em></p>
<p>The question was asked by my conscience, or perhaps by my children. By all the children.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A naked woman sitting on a chair" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘I painted myself naked. I was birthing myself.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://garystockbridge617.getarchive.net/media/emil-von-gerliczy-akt-31a7cc">Emil Von Gerliczy/Public Domain Media</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My reply came: I painted myself naked. I was birthing myself, re-birthing myself, through my own self-regard. As hundreds of women have done before me.</p>
<p>This need to remake myself was precipitated by my mother’s death in 2015 and the end of my marriage two years later. With shocking speed, these two events radically shifted my focus in life and writing from the outside world to my inner being, which lay parched and untended, overgrown with voices that were not my own.</p>
<p>As my married life of caring for and writing about others collapsed, the work that became urgent was a grindingly slow and painful process of self-examination and reinvention. On most days, this felt (and still feels) self-indulgent, in both life and writing. Even verging on heretical – an act against the received orthodoxies of care, of motherhood, of womanhood itself? – despite the bigger questions it’s led me to. And despite its absolute necessity.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘This need to remake myself was precipitated by my mother’s death in 2015 and the end of my marriage two years later.’ Jane Gleeson-White is pictured with her mother in 2005.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘This sort of life can have beauty in it’</h2>
<p>Biggs asks herself a similar question at the outset of A Life of One’s Own. In the wake of her mother’s diagnosis with <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-alzheimers-disease-24662">Alzheimer’s</a> and the end of her marriage, Biggs is filled with questions: about love and feminism, what’s worth living for, and how you might write about this. And, importantly, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for definition, narcissistic self-involvement when the world was burning? Wouldn’t I be better off giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones and my pen?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A large part of me still answers yes to her questions, on my own behalf. And yet the need remains. Every time I’ve fallen, however inadvertently, into the familiar grooves of my old life – from fiery affairs with distant men, to writing about the missing value of care work and the natural world in economic measures – something breaks down: me, the relationship, the man. Sometimes all three. I’m reminded again and again of this simple truth: change happens, things break down.</p>
<p>Biggs’s book is her answer to whether this need to reinvent ourselves is an indulgence. No. It’s vital work.</p>
<p>The questions felt urgent as well as overwhelming. At times I couldn’t face the page – printed or blank – at all. I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others – and that this sort of life can have beauty in it.</p>
<p>Her mother’s Alzheimer’s shakes Biggs’s world. She begins to question the life she’s made and how it fits with her becoming as a writer. In her early 30s, she’s married to a man she met at 19 who wants children as she does not, yet (or ever?). Despite how settled her life feels, she knows she must upend it. Discussions with her husband and experiments with open marriage only convince her of this. He moves out – and she removes her wedding ring and claims her freedom. All this happens by the end of the second page. </p>
<p>Questions about her marriage, lovers, and possible future partners and children are scattered through the subsequent pages; one of Biggs’s driving questions is: what sort of marriage, if any, is possible between a woman who writes and a man? </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Virginia Woolf was obsessed by her mother until she was 44.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">George Charles Beresford</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But as its title from Virginia Woolf suggests, A Life of One’s Own is primarily about women, their lives, writing and relationships with each other. Its emotional force lies in Biggs’s portrayal of her tender and loving relationship with her mother – and in her relationships with women friends, and the authors and books she reads.</p>
<p>The threads of Biggs’s exploration – memoir, biography and literary critique – fuse with particular grace in her chapter on Woolf, which is concerned with the emotionally charged, intractable subject of mothers. Woolf wrote that she was obsessed by her mother until she was 44, when <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/to-the-lighthouse-vintage-classics-woolf-series-9781784870836">To the Lighthouse</a> offered her an outlet:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Biggs seamlessly combines Woolf’s work and milieu with her own experience of her mother’s deteriorating mind and the dreaded day when she no longer recognises her own daughter. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And I remind myself still, with Woolf, that a mother is always a mystery; she has lived so much of her life before you were even born.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And in turn, witnessing her mother’s fading mind opens her to new understandings of Woolf’s literary experiments. She now sees their aim as conveying “the workings of disordered and vulnerable minds”, or the way centuries of oppression “act on a woman when she sits down to write something”.</p>
<h2>Mothers loom large</h2>
<p>When I was 18, inspired by the tempestuous novels of <a href="https://theconversation.com/locked-down-with-d-h-lawrence-yeah-nah-196935">D.H. Lawrence</a>, I began turning my own passionate love affairs into fiction. But every attempt was derailed by the unwelcome arrival of a mother figure. This astonished my teenage self. Only after her death and the end of my marriage did I begin to accept that the hidden life of my mother was partly, mostly, my subject.</p>
<p>Mothers loom large in the books by women I read. I’m not sure why I initially found it so surprising that other women should be as preoccupied with mothers and motherhood as I am. Is it because, despite all the rhetoric, frank public discussion of mothers is taboo?</p>
<p>In ways I find almost terrifying in their candour and dispassion, Rachel Cusk’s portraits of motherhood and maternal ambivalence are among my favourite. <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Rachel-Cusk-Coventry-9780571350445">She writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My mother and I don’t speak to each other any more. […] The loss of a parent-child relationship is a fact. It is also a failure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Discussing Aeschylus’s <a href="https://www.greekmythology.com/Plays/Aeschylus/Oresteia/oresteia.html">Oresteia</a> – in which Orestes, encouraged by his sister Electra, murders their mother Clytemnestra – with a male theatre director, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Rachel-Cusk-Coventry-9780571350445">Cusk summarises</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They hate their mother for the fact that she has disposed of their father. They have come to resent maternal power so much that they destroy it. Instead they reverence the paternal, which is all image – their father, Agamemnon, was away fighting gloriously in Troy for most of their lives – where their actual mother is all actuality. They crush and disdain that actual parent in pursuit of the imagistic father whose value is recognised out in the world. Sound familiar? I ask.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cusk finds this attitude echoed in the conversations between her teenage daughter and her friends, who spend a surprising amount of time talking about adults they know. They contemptuously dismiss their mothers – an amorphous “she” whose status “was somewhere between a servant and family pet” – while they revere “Dad” for his worldly importance: “unlike ‘she’, their fathers are hard-working, clever, successful, cool”.</p>
<p>Women writers attempting such worldly significance seek it at their peril, especially if they’re embroiled with male lovers, even more so if they become mothers.</p>
<h2>Erasing women</h2>
<p>In a letter to a male admirer, Mary Wollstonecraft described her approach to <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman-9780099595823">A Vindication of the Rights of Women</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A book I am now writing, in which I myself, for I cannot yet attain to Homer’s dignity, shall certainly appear, head and heart.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ah, Homer’s dignity. I’m fond of tracing the causes of my afflictions and the ones I see around me to hypothetical origins. I now fix these on the erasure of the Sumerian priestess <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Enheduanna/">Enheduanna</a>, who narrated in the first-person singular – “I” – the earliest known authored text, the <a href="https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr4072.htm">Exhalation of Inanna</a>. Enheduanna lived in the 23rd century BCE. She is the first known named author in the world.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sumerian priestess Enheduanna was the first named author in the world, in the 23rd century BC. Disk of Enheduanna.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Disk_of_Enheduanna_(2).jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This casts new light on Homer’s dignity. <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-iliad-9780140444445">The Iliad</a> and the <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/odyssey-9781556437281">Odyssey</a> were composed around the 8th century BCE. The historical fact of the putative “Homer” – their author or authors – is still debated by scholars. </p>
<p>What difference would it make if we learnt at school that the first named author was a woman, writing in the first person singular some 2,200 years before Homer?</p>
<p>Instead, we have Rachel Cusk in 2009 CE, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/12/rachel-cusk-women-writing-review">writing of woman</a> as “occluded, scattered, disguised”, gone underground. “Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing.”</p>
<p>Or, as Sheila Heti writes at the outset of her novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-should-a-person-be-9780099583561">How Should a Person Be?</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it’s pretty clear. That’s the reason we see them trying to talk themselves up all the time.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Questions of authority and form challenge each of these writers, some to breaking point. Depression and suicide recur. Biggs touches on her own depression, so deep she required medication. I’ve certainly experienced my own. Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice. We know how the vibrant lives of Woolf and Sylvia Plath ended.</p>
<p>My favourite chapter in Biggs’s memoir is on <a href="https://theconversation.com/true-writing-is-a-convulsive-act-inside-the-mind-of-elena-ferrante-180311">Elena Ferrante</a>, whose Neapolitan quartet makes the erasure of women its subject, while centring two bookish women who’ve been friends and rivals since childhood. It’s about the self-erasure of one, Lila, and her reclamation in writing by the other, Lenu. As Biggs puts it, quoting Ferrante, it</p>
<blockquote>
<p>is Lenu’s attempt, over months of writing, to give Lila “a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite our many differences, it’s uncanny how similar Biggs’ and my trajectories have been, from the formative role of our mothers in our reading and divorces, to the central role of books and friendships with women in our unfolding lives. </p>
<p>Most strikingly, we’re both experimenting with new ways of writing our selves. In <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Rachel-Cusk-Aftermath-9780571351640/">her own memoir on marriage and separation</a>, Cusk suggests this urge is not a pathology, but a definition of a feminist:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And perhaps a feminist is someone who possesses this personalising trait to a larger degree: she is an autobiographer, an artist of the self.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207424/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Gleeson-White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>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.Jane Gleeson-White, Adjunct Lecturer, English and Creative Writing, UNSW Canberra, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2041582023-04-26T16:10:36Z2023-04-26T16:10:36ZThe power of anonymity: as Twitter celebrity Dril reveals his identity, an Elena Ferrante expert explains what he’s lost<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521896/original/file-20230419-28-mafgb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C22%2C2968%2C1976&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elena Ferrante chooses to write under a pseudonym to conceal her identity. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/split-croatia-january-15-2023-stack-2253835925">Jelena990/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Scrolling through US comedian and social media phenomenon <a href="https://twitter.com/dril">Dril’s Twitter</a> account can be a confusing experience for those, like me, who don’t share the same references to “Weird Twitter”, videogaming, fast food, obsessive branding and 1990s popular culture.</p>
<p>“Jarring combinations of the stupefyingly mundane and the elaborately scatological” characterise some of Dril’s most liked tweets, according to the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-cracked-wisdom-of-dril">New Yorker</a>. The tweets display a fascination with dog poop, genitals and onanism. They also disregard basic rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar, and frequently use outrageously bad language.</p>
<p>Every so often, however, you find a little gem of caustic humour that gives you a hint of what caused Dril’s success. <a href="https://twitter.com/dril/status/1641102955402387456">For example</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sad to see people betraying their friends for no reason. couldnt be me. i only betray my friends when it gives me an Advantage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After 15 years of posting anonymously, Dril recently revealed his identity. He is a 35-year-old man named Paul Dochney. In an <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tech/2023/4/12/23673003/dril-twitter-interview-profile-identity">interview</a> with The Ringer, he said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>People need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I am not like a magic elf who posts.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This reference to Santa and the fairytale realm alludes to the belief that humans are attracted to lies – that we would rather perpetuate the fabulous illusion of a magical world than search for the truth.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1646264681206632449"}"></div></p>
<h2>Anonymity and authorial power</h2>
<p>As an expert in the Italian novelist <a href="https://theconversation.com/global/topics/elena-ferrante-20079">Elena Ferrante</a>, this reminds me of her 2019 novel <a href="https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781609455910/the-lying-life-of-adults">The Lying Life of Adults</a>. Ferrante is another contemporary celebrity who hides her identity behind a pen name. Despite her anonymity, her Neapolitan novels have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.</p>
<p>In The Lying Life of Adults – recently adapted as a <a href="https://www.netflix.com/ie/title/81252203">TV series for Netflix</a> – the protagonist Giovanna is a young teenager whose world is crushed by the discovery that her father has concealed substantial truths about his past.</p>
<p>The object Ferrante has chosen to symbolise the desirability of falsehood is a bracelet, a shiny heirloom whose original ownership is unclear but which encapsulates feelings of greed and hatred – much like Frodo’s ring in Lord of the Rings and Voldemort’s Horcruxes in the Harry Potter franchise, which cause many people harm. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="statue of Anonymous in a leafy autumn park. The statue is a hooded figure sat with a pen in their hand." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521898/original/file-20230419-28-lrmy7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521898/original/file-20230419-28-lrmy7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521898/original/file-20230419-28-lrmy7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521898/original/file-20230419-28-lrmy7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521898/original/file-20230419-28-lrmy7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521898/original/file-20230419-28-lrmy7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521898/original/file-20230419-28-lrmy7p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Statue of Anonymous in Budapest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/budapest-hungary-october-2019-statue-anonymous-1604136883">Dmitrii Sakharov/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2016, <a href="https://lithub.com/have-italian-scholars-figured-out-the-identity-of-elena-ferrante/">the Italian journalist</a> Claudio Gatti used Ferrante’s financial records to ascertain and publish her true identity. But unlike Dril, <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/online/2016/10/02/elena-ferrante-an-answer/">when she was unmasked</a>, Ferrante invoked her right to remain anonymous and continued to publish her work under a pseudonym – to the huge relief of her fans.</p>
<p>In her latest collection of essays, <a href="https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2022/july/margins-pleasures-reading-and-writing-elena-ferrante">In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing</a>, Ferrante uses another precious object – this time an aquamarine ring rather than a bracelet – to explain how changeable reality is. As much as she tries to capture its essence, that shiny ring shifts and changes. </p>
<p>Each object, like all living things, is a tangle of stories, emotions, ideas. Once we attempt to catch its mutable shape in writing, it will seem “inevitably false” to us. That doesn’t matter, however, as long as the author keeps striving to find a written form for that “tangle”, in the knowledge that the narrator and writer are also “enmeshed” in it. </p>
<p>In choosing anonymity, <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-39367-0_5">I believe</a> that Ferrante is alluding to a digital notion of authorship that is dispersed and collaborative – in which a disembodied author’s identity is shaped by dialogue with the world around them.</p>
<p>It is this “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/21/elena-ferrante-god-didnt-make-good-impression">absolute openness to the other</a>, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life”, and ultimately to the more-than-human world, that explains Ferrante’s success on the global scene.</p>
<h2>Anonymous holds a mirror</h2>
<p>This is also the reason why readers and fans often prefer to remain in the dark. As long as the changeable identity of the author is not pinned down to an actual person, it will ring true. Their voice will contain the echoes of our own voice and their face will be a mirror in which we will see our own reflection.</p>
<p>To any artist, remaining anonymous may afford unprecedented creative freedom along with an ability to bear witness to the truth or broadcast a political message. Graffiti artist <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/banksy-7818">Banksy</a> is a case in point.</p>
<p>The Bristol muralist is one of the most valued contemporary artists, despite the accusations of vandalism sometimes levelled at him. Recently, <a href="https://theconversation.com/banksy-in-ukraine-how-his-defiant-new-works-offer-hope-194952">his powerful artwork in Kyiv</a> has brought attention to the trauma inflicted to the Ukrainian population during the Russian invasion. His art speaks for itself.</p>
<p>We don’t need to know whose hand guides the pen or the brush – or who delivers Santa’s gifts. As Ferrante writes in her 2003 collection of non-fiction texts, <a href="https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781609452926/frantumaglia">Frantumaglia</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I woke up and the gifts were there … True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the mask is removed, Dril might gain a closer connection with his audience. But he will lose the magical aura that anonymity had crafted for him.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to restore paragraphs that were mistakenly lost during the final review stage.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204158/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Enrica Maria Ferrara does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fans often prefer to remain in the dark about the identity of their favourite authors and artistsEnrica Maria Ferrara, Teaching Fellow, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1861962023-01-23T02:07:43Z2023-01-23T02:07:43ZMy favourite fictional character: I’ll never forget these half-wild, ‘too much’ heroines – Philip Pullman’s Lyra and Elena Ferrante’s Lila<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499935/original/file-20221209-25133-3bblu5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C15%2C2041%2C1345&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lila, played by Ludovica Nasti (right) in the HBO production of Elena Ferrante's My Beautiful Friend.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eduardo Castaldo/HBO</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Reading Philip Pullman’s <a href="https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/products/His-Dark-Materials-Northern-Lights-Philip-Pullman-9781407130224">Northern Lights</a> to my children around 2007, I met its heroine, Lyra Belacqua. My children barely remember her. I will never forget her – nor Pantalaimon, her daemon; her soul in protean animal form. </p>
<p>Lyra was the first fictional girl to feel familiar to me. Before her, there’d only been men: Achilles, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Sorel">Julien Sorel</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Myshkin">Prince Lev Myshkin</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bezukhov">Pierre Bezukhov</a>.</p>
<p>Lyra is a “barbarian”, a “half-wild cat”. She’s a fierce and fearless teller of tall tales who clambers over rooftops and plays gangs in the streets of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/goth-steampunk-and-the-state-of-subculture-today-68192">steampunk</a> Oxford. I love her disdain for clothes and cleanliness. I love her autonomy, her temper, her insatiable curiosity. And the fact that her best friend is a boy – and later, a drunk and ravaged polar bear. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-grown-ups-still-need-fairy-tales-87078">Friday essay: why grown-ups still need fairy tales</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A gift for reading truth</h2>
<p>But I especially love her gift for reading the alethiometer (from the Greek “aletheia”, truth). This truth-teller, or symbol-reader, is like a compass of brass and crystal. </p>
<p>There are pictures round its rim: multilayered symbols that can mean many different things. (An anchor could be hope, steadfastness, a snag or the sea.) You ask a question by moving its three hands to particular symbols – and its long, swinging needle answers; mysteriously guided and simultaneously interpreted by the reader’s mind.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499888/original/file-20221208-19983-r288df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lyra with alethiometer, in the TV adaptation of Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (which includes Northern Lights).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">His Dark Materials: Betrayal/IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is an esoteric art that takes years of book learning to master. But Lyra teaches herself in weeks. She’s a natural. She instinctively understands how to free and yet focus her mind to roam among the symbols. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>She found if she held the alethiomter just so in her palms and gazed at it in a particular lazy way, as she thought of it, the long needle would begin to move more purposefully … and although she understood nothing of it, she gained a deep calm enjoyment from it, unlike anything she’d known.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Everyone in this world is after Lyra, for her unique skill with the alethiometer – and her rumoured destiny. She’s a special child, with a hidden, scandalous parentage and a future of cosmic import.</p>
<p>My own fascination with symbols led me to a course on feminist, moon-centred astrology in 1992. Reading the symbols on an astrological wheel similarly requires a capacity to both be free and focus your mind, which came easily to me. I’d never read a better description of this than Pullman’s in Northern Lights.</p>
<p>But was it problematic that as a grown-up woman responsible for two young children, the fictional character I most related to was a half-wild, symbol-reading child?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a girl in a parka and beanie with a polar bear" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499946/original/file-20221209-27548-p3m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lyra’s best friend is a drunk and ravaged polar bear.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">His Dark Materials: Betrayal/IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Talking about Lila</h2>
<p>It was with a weird sense of relief that ten years later I met Lila Cerullo, the title character in Elena Ferrante’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35036409-my-brilliant-friend">My Brilliant Friend</a>. Here was another ferocious, filthy, quicksilver girl, “too much for anyone” – but who, over the course of four novels set in “real” postwar Naples, actually grows up, finds work, becomes a woman, has lovers, children, a career.</p>
<p>Lila seemed a version of Lyra, but she was much more complex – and much more shareable among friends. I love almost nothing more than talking books. It wasn’t just that Lila grows up; it was that Lila and her friend Lena, who narrates My Brilliant Friend, had become global phenomena. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499937/original/file-20221209-16679-hulkq8.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lila (right, played by Gaia Girace) and her friend Lena, who narrates My Beautiful Friend, became global phenomena.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">HBO</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Northern Lights and its two sequels (His Dark Materials trilogy) had also been bestselling and critically acclaimed, I didn’t know many adults who’d read them. On the other hand, Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels became a worldwide bestselling sensation. </p>
<p>By 2017, everyone wanted to talk about them.</p>
<p>That year I’d split up with my children’s father and left behind my work in the predominately male world of accounting and sustainability. When a friend pressed Karl Ove Knausgaard’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-death-in-the-family-9780099555162">My Struggle</a> onto me, I read 100 pages and threw it down in disgust. I vowed to fill my head with women’s voices. The first book I picked up was My Brilliant Friend.</p>
<p>I fell for Lila immediately. She has the same storytelling impulse as Lyra, the same capacity to transform life into <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-early-australian-fairy-tales-displaced-aboriginal-people-with-mythical-creatures-and-fantasies-of-empty-land-185592">fairy tale</a> or <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-scary-tales-for-scary-times-181597">horror story</a>. And a similar wayward self-reliance, quick temper, fearlessness and wilful disregard of others – and the same impassioned urge for justice, such as when schoolgirl Lila holds a knife to the throat of a young man twice her size who’s grabbed Lena’s wrist and broken her bracelet.</p>
<p>She said calmly, in dialect, “Touch her again and I’ll show you what happens.”</p>
<p>And when they bother, both Lyra and Lila are brilliant, capable of exceptional mental, emotional and physical feats. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/true-writing-is-a-convulsive-act-inside-the-mind-of-elena-ferrante-180311">True writing is a convulsive act: inside the mind of Elena Ferrante</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Dissolving margins and a loosened mind</h2>
<p>Lila’s destiny hangs heavy over the Neapolitan quartet. It’s foretold by her adult son on the opening page. Lena extrapolates: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace … she wanted every one of her cells to disappear.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This desire to disappear relates to a formative moment in Lila’s adolescence: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn’t mine, she always used it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lila’s perception unmoors, bounded matter breaks down and she glimpses something terrifying at the heart of ordinary life. Her pulse races, she’s filled with revulsion. Lila’s dissolving matter, like Lyra’s loosened mind, felt uncannily familiar to me.</p>
<p>In my own times of dissolution, I return to Lyra. Reading Northern Lights recalibrates my soul. On the other hand, Lila – and Lena – set in motion an entirely new chapter of my life: reading women’s voices and learning to write my own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186196/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Gleeson-White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>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.Jane Gleeson-White, Adjunct Lecturer, UNSW Canberra, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1803112022-04-14T05:36:24Z2022-04-14T05:36:24ZTrue writing is a convulsive act: inside the mind of Elena Ferrante<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457820/original/file-20220413-16-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=22%2C11%2C1888%2C1264&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco in the television adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel My Brilliant Friend (2018)</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image: IMDb</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Where does great writing come from? How does the reading of writers shape their work? Perhaps the great writers are true originals, free from influence? </p>
<p>For many readers of Elena Ferrante’s celebrated novels of the relationships between girls and women, her stories are so distinctive they appear to have arrived fully formed. In the essays collected in her latest book, though, she offers a compelling account of the vital role her reading has played in the creation of her work.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing – Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa)</em></p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455440/original/file-20220331-19-urolii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym; the author’s true identity is unknown. And there is a connection between her anonymity throughout her long career – even as the Neapolitan novels brought her international fame – and the way she regards her inheritance from literature. This singular writer associates her anonymity with a refusal to promote the individual writer to “protagonist”. </p>
<p>During <a href="http://elenaferrante.com/reviews/the-paris-review-2/">a rare in-person interview</a> with her publishers, Ferrante argued against the media’s “demand for self-promotion”. All literature, she said, is the product of tradition:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a sort of collective intelligence. We wrongfully diminish this intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist behind every work of art.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the Margins, a collection of four essays on a life of reading and writing, makes clear the complex debt to literature that Ferrante and all writers owe, no matter how distinctive and celebrated they might be. Together the essays offer a fascinating commentary on coming to writing through reading. Importantly, they show how a restless critique of one’s reading and writing can add fuel to the fire.</p>
<h2>Writing inside the margins</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455448/original/file-20220331-24-j6b8lf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) was the great female poet of the Renaissance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first essay, “Pain and Pen”, describes the young Ferrante’s first attempts to write and sets up the major theme of the book: the struggle between two kinds of writing. </p>
<p>At school, learning to write in her notebook, Ferrante was taught to write neatly, within the red margins of the page, often encountering punishment for straying over the right-hand line. From then on, she felt both a sense of danger when she strayed too close to the margin and a curtailment when her writing remained neatly within the red margins: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I believe that the sense I have of writing – and all the struggles it involves – has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ferrante’s novels, we come to understand, emerge from a battle between form and wildness. </p>
<h2>The female pen</h2>
<p>A parallel struggle arises for the young writer between what she reads – what has been decreed literature – and what she might write, from her own imperfect self. </p>
<p>For a young woman, there is an extra degree of difficulty. “I read a lot,” Ferrante says of her youth, “but what I liked was almost always written by men.” </p>
<p>She tried unsatisfactorily to imitate the “male voice” in her head. By the end of her adolescence, that male voice had left Ferrante believing that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not only was writing difficult but I was a girl and so would never be able to write books like those great writers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Literature is intimidating and excluding, but it will also articulate for Ferrante the nature of the problem and suggest solutions. Towards the end of high school, she tells us, “completely by chance I came across the Rime of Gaspara Stampa”. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/stampa-gaspara-1523-1554">Stampa</a>, the great female poet of the Renaissance, used her pain in love to inspire her pen, wishing to draw from within </p>
<blockquote>
<p>her own “human flesh”, a garment of words sewn with a pain of her own and a pen of her own. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Across the centuries, Stampa’s writing passes on its message: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the female pen, precisely because it is unexpected within the female tradition, had to make an enormous, courageous effort.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Several times in these essays, books arrive in Ferrante’s hands like a divine gift, offering just what she needs. Messages appear in chance readings, re-readings and re-evaluations of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and others.</p>
<p>She learns that writing requires deep courage, that the small “I” of a woman might link herself to history, that women can tell their own and each other’s stories. In Dante, she sees Beatrice speak with wisdom and authority, and it spurs her on.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-dantes-divine-comedy-84603">Guide to the Classics: Dante’s Divine Comedy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>True writing is tempting fate</h2>
<p>The books appear when the writer needs them, as if by magic, but it is clear that in Ferrante they find a hungry and perceptive reader, alert to the lessons of reading, ready to absorb what the young writer needs. </p>
<p>Writing, like reading, requires this kind of alertness to the gifts of chance. Ferrante portrays the writer as a patient being, keeping an eye out in the work for the spark of something alive that will capture the chaotic energy of the world. </p>
<p>“It’s one thing,” Ferrante writes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>to plan a story and execute it well, another is that completely aleatoric writing, no less active than the world it tries to order. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=987&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=987&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455367/original/file-20220330-23-1a2qpv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=987&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gertrude Stein in 1913.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Alea</em> in “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music">aleatoric</a>” is from the Latin for dice. The writer throws the dice and must be ready to follow where they lead her.</p>
<p>Reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Ferrante finds an image for the “true writing” she seeks. Woolf records a conversation with Lytton Strachey, in which she says that writing fiction is like rummaging in a bran pie. She is “twenty people” when she does this, and she does not know what will come out. </p>
<p>Writing, Ferrante reads from this, “is a pure tempting of fate”. It </p>
<blockquote>
<p>doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular I, solidly planted in everyday life, but is twenty people, that is, a number thrown out there to say: when I write, not even I know who I am. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She waits for “other I’s” to pull her beyond the margins, to take her </p>
<blockquote>
<p>where I’m afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won’t necessarily know how to get back.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455447/original/file-20220331-21-m4arl4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Virginia Woolf - Roger Fry (c.1917)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">Guide to the classics: A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's feminist call to arms</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Frantamuglia</h2>
<p>It is easy to recognise here the novelist of the perilous emotional territory between girls and women, of the truths that others would be afraid to speak aloud. Ferrante understands that the work is to wait </p>
<blockquote>
<p>patiently to start writing with all the truth I’m capable of, destabilizing, deforming, to make space for myself with my whole body. For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The truth of this writing comes from the subconscious. It is a “slip up” of the mind that draws on <em>frantamuglia</em>, what Ferrante’s mother called her internal terror: “a whirlpool of fragment-words … the debris from a land submerged by the fury of the waters”. </p>
<p>It is much more appealing to remain within the margins, to be a writer who orders the world “into neat narratives”, than to venture into this frightening territory. Yet Ferrante knows </p>
<blockquote>
<p>that the pages that finally persuade me to publish books come from there … beneath the order is an enduring energy that will stumble, disarrange …</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Frantamuglia</em> is also the title of a collection of Ferrante’s thoughts, letters and interviews published in 2016, soon after journalist Claudio Gatti published <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/02/elena-ferrante-an-answer/">an article attempting to reveal her identity in the New York Review of Books</a>. The collection and the term stand as firm resistance to attempts to limit existence to the fully ordered and known. </p>
<h2>The difficulty of storytelling</h2>
<p>The perhaps inevitable result of the tension between order and some disarranging force is an increasing dissatisfaction with the realist form, with its pretence that the world leaves the imprint of truth on the page without an intermediary.</p>
<p>Ferrante becomes attuned to stories that illuminate the slipperiness of storytelling: “books that discuss how difficult it is to tell a story and yet intensify the desire to do it”.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457823/original/file-20220413-22-c1je05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Novelist Elizabeth Strout, author of My Name is Lucy Barton.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Larry D. Moore/ Creative commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This becomes a lifelong obsession. In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/05/i-felt-different-as-a-child-i-was-nearly-mute-elena-ferrante-in-conversation-with-elizabeth-strout">a recent correspondence with the novelist Elizabeth Strout</a>, Ferrante states that she particularly admires Strout’s novel My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) for the protagonist’s status as a writer and for its attention to the difficulties of saying, in writing, how something really was. Ferrante explains that she has a special shelf in her library for books that centre the problems of writing, and that My Name is Lucy Barton sits upon it. </p>
<p>We recognise Ferrante’s characters in such statements, the ways in which they make fierce attempts to narrate their lives. And we can very much see the author in the following, which Ferrante wrote in her notebook as a teenager: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The writer has a duty to put into words the shoves he gives and those he receives from others.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If “he” were replaced by “she”, Ferrante might be talking about any of her novels. </p>
<h2>The freedom of the cage</h2>
<p>Finally, the young Ferrante writes a book that doesn’t “seem too bad”. She develops a plan to send it to a publisher with a letter explaining the story’s origins and influences. What she will write in this letter seems clear to her. She describes the real people and places from which she began, and the distortions it has been necessary to apply, as well as the novels that have inspired her writing. </p>
<p>As she goes on, however, the truth of the letter becomes complicated. She sees her “urge to exaggerate defects, minimize virtues, and vice versa”. There is an inkling, too, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>of what I could have written in that book but that would have hurt me to write, and so I hadn’t done it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ferrante gives up on the endeavour, but over the years she makes important discoveries: about writing in the first person, about realism as a “repertory of tricks”, about the centrality of the narrator, about the inability of literature to order the “whirlpool of debris”. She credits these discoveries to the attempt to write that letter. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1361&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455445/original/file-20220331-18-kj80a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1361&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dante and Beatrice - Ary Scheffer (1851)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That letter and its dormant lessons might be considered an “exegesis”. An exegesis is a critical interpretation of a text, originally of scripture. It has become a genre of assessment within the study of creative expression. Students of creative writing, art and music, for example, will produce a piece and provide an accompanying exegesis. </p>
<p>An exegesis can be difficult to write, as the letter was for Ferrante. It is trying to get at an elusive kind of truth. How was the thing made? Where did it come from? </p>
<p>The exegesis forms a kind of partner to the art, as reading is to writing. It responds to and helps to create the artwork dynamically. The discoveries made in writing the exegesis, in considering what has been learned in trying to make the art, should help to develop the art further. Ferrante’s letter and these essays are stunning examples of this mode in practice over a life’s work.</p>
<p>The significance of exegesis arises from the importance of critical reading. All writers do the work of exegesis, even if they don’t try to write down the process. They interact with what they read, working through admiration and dissatisfaction. A writer I admire tells only a part of the truth – what can I make of that?</p>
<p>In these essays, Ferrante tells a gripping story of how the writing self is made by reading, of how literature is writing that both admires and is dissatisfied with the forms that it has been given. </p>
<p>“I’ve never stopped believing in the importance of the writing we’ve inherited, which the ‘I’ who writes … is made of,” Ferrante tells us. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Belinda Castles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In her new essay collection, Elena Ferrante tells the compelling story of her reading and writing life, and the battle between form and wildness.Belinda Castles, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1661872021-08-17T04:43:01Z2021-08-17T04:43:01ZFreud, Nietzsche, Paglia, Fanon: our expert guide to the books of The White Lotus<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416434/original/file-20210817-18-1wr9qfn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1584%2C1178&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mario Perez/HBO</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Freud and Nietzsche may not be what you have in mind when thinking of pool-side reads, but they are among the books flipped through in The White Lotus — the tense, new TV drama about the lives of the rich and privileged as they overlap at a Hawaiian resort. </p>
<p>Are Paula and Olivia truly delving into the mind of the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, or indeed, into Camille Paglia’s deconstruction of the Western literary canon? Or are they just books for show: an intellectual performance to hide secret glances and gossip?</p>
<p>Either way, frequent book covers speak loudly in the show. So here, then, is what the experts think you should know about these props and the stories they tell.</p>
<p>Maybe you will find one to pick up the next time you fly off for your island holiday. Just try to avoid the White Lotus resort.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1424822796635541506"}"></div></p>
<h2>The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud</h2>
<p>“If I cannot bend the heavens above, I will move Hell.” Sigmund Freud quotes the poet Virgil to describe his aim in this book of explaining the meaning of dreams — by recourse to his theory of the unconscious mind. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Interpretation of Dreams" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416282/original/file-20210816-23-nenqrd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Freud always considered Interpretation of Dreams his masterpiece, and ensured it would be published in 1900 to mark its significance. </p>
<p>Dreams had traditionally been viewed as either senseless or vehicles of communication with the divine. Freud instead contended all dreams involve the fulfilment of a wish. </p>
<p>In adults, he wrote, many of the wishes we have are of such an “edgy” nature their fulfilment would wake us up if staged too directly. </p>
<p>So, in order to at once fulfil these unconscious wishes and stay asleep, the “dream work” of the sleeping mind distorts the wish, using mechanisms of displacement (making insignificant things seem important, and the other way around), condensation (bringing together multiple ideas in single images), and transforming words into the seemingly random images. </p>
<p>Packed with striking dream analyses, and containing perhaps the best systematic statement of Freud’s theory of the mind, this book is an influential classic.</p>
<p><strong>—Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy</strong></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/unravelling-the-mysteries-of-sleep-how-the-brain-sees-dreams-45889">Unravelling the mysteries of sleep: how the brain 'sees' dreams</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon</h2>
<p>Psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique. After the second world war, he studied in France. Later, in 1953, he moved to Algeria, joining the Algerian National Liberation Front.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Wretched of the Earth" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1109&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1109&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416277/original/file-20210816-19-1bnbznq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1109&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The Wretched of the Earth (originally published as <em>Les damnés de la terre</em> in 1961) was written at the height of the Algerian War of Independence. Based on Fanon’s first-hand experience of working in colonial Algeria, it is a classic text of postcolonial studies, examining the physical and psychological violence colonised people experience. </p>
<p>Fanon’s book is a lucid and damning account of the impact of colonialism: the ways it irrevocably changes people, their societies and their culture. </p>
<p>A passionate call to resist colonisation and oppression, The Wretched of the Earth was seen as dangerous by colonial powers at the time of its publication. It is still an important anti-colonial work today.</p>
<p><strong>—Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English</strong></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-fanon-continues-to-resonate-more-than-half-a-century-after-algerias-independence-43508">Why Fanon continues to resonate more than half a century after Algeria's independence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia</h2>
<p>Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) is a provocative survey of Western canonical art and culture. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Sexual Personae book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1040&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1307&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1307&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416402/original/file-20210816-19-1jcy5hb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1307&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>On its publication, Sexual Personae was considered iconoclastic, groundbreaking and subversive for, as Paglia wrote, its focus on “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism and pornography in great art”. </p>
<p>The book was both lauded for its insights into sex, violence and power; and labelled anti-feminist and sinister in its views about gender and sexuality. </p>
<p>Sexual Personae discusses the decadence and enduring influence of paganism in Western culture. Paglia connects sexual freedom to sadomasochism and argues that our self-destructive and lustful <a href="https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/what-nietzsche-really-meant-the-apollonian-and-dionysian">Dionysian impulses are in tension with our Apollonian instincts</a> for order. </p>
<p>Named after Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Paglia’s book charts recurrent types in the Western imagination, such as the “beautiful boy”, the “femme fatale” and the “female vampire”. Through these personae, she discusses works such as the Mona Lisa, Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Particularly famous is the chapter on Emily Dickinson and Paglia’s analysis of the brutal and sadistic metaphors in Dickinson’s poetry.</p>
<p>Paglia’s Sexual Personae is both electrifying and divisive; still one of the most important texts in 1990s sexual politics.</p>
<p><strong>—Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature</strong></p>
<h2>My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante</h2>
<p>Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011), the first volume of her Neapolitan Series, is a feminist coming-of-age story that begins with a mystery. </p>
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<p>In the first few pages, a distinguished writer, Elena (known as Lenù), learns an old friend, Raffaella (or Lila), has disappeared without a trace. Lila’s disappearance prompts Lenù to begin writing the story of her life, focusing particularly on the pair’s complicated friendship. </p>
<p>Focusing on their childhood in 1950s Naples, she writes unsentimentally of poverty, violence, familial conflicts and organised crime. </p>
<p>The novel is densely plotted and written with unsparing accuracy about the characters of Naples, but Lenù’s candid narration makes for an utterly engrossing reading experience. In plain, fast-paced prose she describes a grim childhood full of misogyny and domestic violence, but enlivened by her friendship with Lila. </p>
<p>Ferrante gives us a moving portrait of friendship. Over the course of the novel, both girls begin to see glimpses of how they might move beyond the limitations of the world they have inherited. </p>
<p><strong>—Lucas Thompson, Lecturer in English</strong></p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/elena-ferrante-a-vanishing-author-and-the-question-of-posthuman-identity-118138">Elena Ferrante: a vanishing author and the question of posthuman identity</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann</h2>
<p>For Nietzsche, to write philosophy was to render one’s experience into life-affirming art — even if that art rocked the very foundations of culture itself.</p>
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<p>Walter Kaufmann’s translations in The Portable Nietzsche (1954) showcase much of the power and beauty of one of the finest minds in Western culture. </p>
<p>Here is Nietzsche’s devastating psychological portrait of St Paul; here is the infamous announcement of <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">the death of God</a>. They sit together with his complex notion of cheerfulness practised in the face of the terrifying collapse of certainties. </p>
<p>Despite his reputation in some quarters as a malevolent destroyer, Nietzsche’s actual aim of avoiding nihilism is well-captured here. </p>
<p>His cavorting and richly subversive “fifth gospel”, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51893.Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=5kaOopRTy8&rank=1">Thus Spoke Zarathustra</a>, is reproduced in full, as is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/786605.The_Anti_Christ_Ecce_Homo_Twilight_of_the_Idols_and_Other_Writings?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=VbNVqAzlLD&rank=3">Twilight of the Idols</a>, one of his last works and a fine condensation of his mature project.</p>
<p>Kaufmann’s translations are now dated and his selection of Nietzsche’s works is occasionally eccentric, but The Portable Nietzsche goes an admirable way to presenting Nietzsche’s many aspects: the shy recluse, the loather of anti-Semites, the brilliant transfigurer of pain into texts of depth and beauty, and the lover of life, come what may.</p>
<p><strong>—Jamie Parr, Lecturer in Philosophy</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell</h2>
<p>Malcolm Galdwell’s Blink (2005) opens with an anecdote about a <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kouros">kouros</a></em>: an ancient Greek statue bought by the Getty Museum in 1985 for just under $10 million. Despite months of due diligence to check the authenticity of the statue, the Getty was duped – the statue had been made in the 1980s.</p>
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<p>The discovery of the fake was attributed to an art historian who, according to Gladwell, knew as soon as he clapped eyes on it that it was not the real deal.</p>
<p>This instant of recognition (a “blink”) is what Gladwell describes as the “power of thinking without thinking”. Gladwell argues going with your gut can often lead to far superior decisions than thinking things over. </p>
<p>Blink is an entertaining collection of anecdotes, from art-historians to “marriage-whisperers” who can tell if a relationship is going to last from watching split-second videos of partners interacting. But, as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.</p>
<p><strong>—Ben Newell, Professor of Cognitive Psychology</strong></p>
<p>None of these strike your fancy? The characters also pick up Judith Butler, Aimé Césaire and Jacques Lacan — just more light reads on feminism, colonialism and psychoanalysis. </p>
<p><em>White Lotus is now streaming on Binge.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166187/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
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.Jane Howard, Arts + Culture EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1571082021-08-08T10:38:29Z2021-08-08T10:38:29Z‘Goodreads’ readers #ReadWomen, and so should university English departments<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412448/original/file-20210721-17-1dt0va4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=164%2C233%2C4296%2C2818&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The social network website Goodreads provides insight into what some women are reading.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Flip Mishevski/Unsplash)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Even in the 21st century, women writers are often consigned to what American novelist Meg Wolitzer has called “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/on-the-rules-of-literary-fiction-for-men-and-women.html">the second shelf</a>.” Women’s novels are designed and marketed with a female audience in mind and publishers still presume that novels about women won’t appeal to male readers. Unfortunately, even in 2021 there may be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women">some truth to this presumption</a>. </p>
<p>This sexism can be seen in the continued speculation that female-identifying novelist Elena Ferrante is <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/did-this-man-write-the-novels-of-elena-ferrante/">actually a man</a>.
<em>Vanity Fair</em> contributing editor and book columnist Elissa Schappell summarized the assumptions behind the speculation: the novelist’s prolific output of <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child">“serious” books that interweave history, politics, violence, sex and domestic life, while “unflinchingly showing</a> women in an unflattering light.” </p>
<p>Books by female-identifying authors are also less likely to be reviewed in prestigious literary magazines. <a href="https://www.vidaweb.org/the-count/2019-vida-count/">In 2019</a>, more than 60 per cent of reviews in magazines including <em>London Review of Books</em>, <em>The Atlantic</em>, and <em>Harper’s</em>, were of books written by men. This is actually an improvement <a href="https://www.vidaweb.org/vida-count/the-count-2010/">since 2010</a>, when between 69 per cent and 80 per cent of reviews in these magazines were of male-authored books. </p>
<p>The popular #readwomen hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/readwomen">on Twitter</a> has been one response to the marginalization of women authors or sexism about their work. The social network website Goodreads can also provide insight into what women are reading.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1236586915249479680"}"></div></p>
<h2>Reading women</h2>
<p>My collaborative research with data science professor Mike Thelwall has explored the reading habits of a cohort of mostly female readers (<a href="https://wlv.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/2436/609243/GoodReadsASocialNetworkSiteForBookReaders_preprint.pdf;jsessionid=223CEB6104487E721038873505055240?sequence=1">76 per cent</a>) on the popular social network site Goodreads. As a group, Goodreads users also skew <a href="https://culturalanalytics.org/article/12049-the-social-lives-of-books-reading-victorian-literature-on-goodreads">younger, whiter and more educated</a> than the general population. </p>
<p>We examined what books readers read on Goodreads compared to what university professors assign in the classroom, using data from the <a href="https://blog.opensyllabus.org/about-the-open-syllabus-project/">Open Syllabus Project</a>. </p>
<p>In past decades, researchers relied on <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/index.html">handwritten diaries, letters</a> and <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807843499/reading-the-romance/">surveys of readers</a> to find out how everyday readers responded to the books they read. Goodreads, which collects book reviews and ratings from <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/252986/number-of-registered-members-on-goodreadscom/#:%7E:text=As%20of%20the%20last%20reported,had%20accumulated%2090%20million%20members.">90 million members</a>, offers one portal into reading habits. </p>
<p>On average, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/475-sex-and-reading-a-look-at-who-s-reading-whom">women Goodreads users read twice as much as male Goodreads users</a>, and are more willing to read books by both male and female authors.</p>
<p>We scraped data from Goodreads and found that most Goodreads book club members were likely to have read books in common by <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JD-10-2018-0172/full/html">women authors</a>. </p>
<p>These women authors fell into two categories: young adult authors (J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, Stephanie Meyer and Veronica Roth) and 19th- or early 20th-century authors (Jane Austen and Harper Lee). The popularity of young adult series by women, including the <em>Harry Potter</em> and <em>Hunger Games</em> series, means that <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JD-10-2018-0172/full/html">13 of the 19 most popular titles are by women</a>.</p>
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<img alt="Cover of three books from the Hunger Games series" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412974/original/file-20210724-19-g6fb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412974/original/file-20210724-19-g6fb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412974/original/file-20210724-19-g6fb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412974/original/file-20210724-19-g6fb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412974/original/file-20210724-19-g6fb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412974/original/file-20210724-19-g6fb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412974/original/file-20210724-19-g6fb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A study found that that most Goodreads book club members were likely to have read books in common by women authors.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Compared to what professors teach</h2>
<p>In a <a href="https://culturalanalytics.org/article/12049-the-social-lives-of-books-reading-victorian-literature-on-goodreads">second study</a>, we compared what books Goodreads users read to what university professors assign in the classroom, using data from the <a href="https://blog.opensyllabus.org/about-the-open-syllabus-project/">Open Syllabus Project</a>. The Open Syllabus Project originated at Columbia University. It amasses syllabi, or college reading lists, from openly accessible university websites. Open Syllabus currently has a corpus of over nine million syllabi from 140 countries.</p>
<p>Our study focused on Victorian literature, literature published during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901), which is both commonly taught at the university level and still read by general readers. </p>
<p>For the most part, we found that Goodreads users read books — including classic works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde — about as often as university professors taught them. </p>
<p>However, we also found that the books that Goodreads users read more often than they were assigned in university tended to be by women writers, to feature strong female protagonists and to be aimed at a young adult audience — or all three. </p>
<h2>Taking women writers seriously</h2>
<p>This research is important because it suggests that professors who want to connect to students should take women writers more seriously.</p>
<p>Women writers show up less often than male writers on university syllabi. A survey conducted at McGill University in 2018 showed that <a href="https://txtlab.org/2018/01/investigating-topic-bias-and-gender-representation-in-syllabi/">73 per cent of writers</a> assigned on the university’s English literature syllabi are men. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, this is <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7592743/">no surprise</a>: English Prof. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2935123?casa_token=INba7l0-kKgAAAAA%3AhvdHFcRVBQTxk622DXren1qGh4jsn7tZGE1_5eUMLERHUJIhAnmtL6vszL7QQT5ihCzeAcoxhBeWdffrye8MlDuGFTdnhvkgM-a9eb72L8v6YZbPXPQ&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">John Guillory’s</a> work on canon formation captures the state of college English classes 30 years ago (<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/david-gilmour-not-interested-in-teaching-on-women-authors-1.1868197">and sometimes even more recently</a>) when it was not uncommon for English professors to teach only white men. </p>
<p>Works by women writers are formative for many readers. For example, <em>Wuthering Heights</em> and <em>Jane Eyre</em> are often among <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Crossover-Fiction-Global-and-Historical-Perspectives/Beckett/p/book/9780415879361">the first “adult” novels that young English-language readers read</a>. Their combination of romance and strong female protagonists continues to appeal to 21st-century readers outside the classroom. </p>
<p>Our study also showed that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s <em>The Secret Garden</em> and <em>A Little Princess</em>, and Lewis Carroll’s <em>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</em> — three works of young adult fiction featuring girls — were also read more on Goodreads than we would predict given how often they were assigned on syllabi. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jane-eyre-translated-57-languages-show-how-different-cultures-interpret-charlotte-brontes-classic-novel-124128">Jane Eyre translated: 57 languages show how different cultures interpret Charlotte Brontë's classic novel</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It is more than time that publishers, book reviewers and university professors give women writers the respect they deserve. In an era of <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/07/18/new-analysis-english-departments-says-numbers-majors-are-way-down-2012-its-not-death">declining English majors</a> when <a href="https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/gender-distribution-degrees-english-language-and-literature">most English majors are women</a>, English departments can at least start by assigning more women writers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157108/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karen Bourrier has received funding from SSHRC. </span></em></p>The books Goodreads users read more often than are assigned in university tend to be by women writers and to feature strong female protagonists.Karen Bourrier, Associate Professor of English, University of CalgaryLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1181382019-07-01T08:02:07Z2019-07-01T08:02:07ZElena Ferrante: a vanishing author and the question of posthuman identity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281750/original/file-20190628-94704-1a0lreq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C1191%2C664&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, is now a successful television series.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">HBO</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Does it matter who we really are? It definitely does in the eye of the law or if we are in a line of work in which our identity is crucial to perform our job correctly. For example, if we say that we can fly an aeroplane and we are subsequently hired as commercial pilots, our identity really does matter to the hundreds of people whose lives would be in danger if we had never received appropriate training for it. </p>
<p>But there’s a professional field in which, according to world-renowned writer Elena Ferrante, registry office records and formal education do not really count. As she <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/07/elena-ferrante-ever-since-adolescence-i-have-liked-the-term-unknown">wrote in her column for The Guardian</a> in April 2018:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the work of art, biography and autobiography have a truth completely different from that which we attribute to a CV or an income tax return. In that space there is, there has to be, a freedom of invention that allows one to violate all the agreements about truth in everyday life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ever since her debut novel, L'amore molesto (Troubling Love) was published in 1992, Ferrante has been consistent with this attitude – revealing very little about her CV and even less about her income tax return. That is, until the day journalist Claudio Gatti published <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/books/elena-ferrante-anita-raja-domenico-starnone.html">a report of his investigation</a> into the identity of the writer in October 2016. Based on Gatti’s analysis of publisher’s accounts, there is evidence to suggest that the author of the Neapolitan Novels coincides with one particular bank account holder: the translator Anita Raja, wife of Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone.</p>
<p>In April 2017 I interviewed Starnone at the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin. Being a voracious reader of his books I was really looking forward to that meeting and had been preparing for a few months. The tension started rising when I heard that Raja was also going to be in Dublin. I was warned not to ask any questions which could imply in any way that I believed Raja – or Starnone, for that matter – could be the brains behind the “Elena Ferrante” books: “Domenico <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/15/who-italian-novelist-elena-ferrante">gets really angry</a> when someone asks him if he is Elena,” I was told.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277423/original/file-20190531-69083-7z09q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277423/original/file-20190531-69083-7z09q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277423/original/file-20190531-69083-7z09q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277423/original/file-20190531-69083-7z09q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277423/original/file-20190531-69083-7z09q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277423/original/file-20190531-69083-7z09q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277423/original/file-20190531-69083-7z09q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Enrica Maria Ferrara interviewing the author Domenico Starnone in Dublin, April 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But I couldn’t resist the temptation and I allowed myself one question that could be indirectly hinting at the issue of Ferrante’s identity. It had to do with Starnone’s 2016 novel <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/books/review/ties-domenico-starnone-jhumpa-lahiri.html">Ties</a>, which starts off with a series of letters written by the protagonist Vanda, who is distraught after her husband Aldo has abandoned her for a younger woman. I asked him:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ties is divided into three sections written from three different points of view: the husband, the wife and the children. How challenging was it to write the story from Vanda’s perspective? Generally speaking, is it hard for a male writer to engage in a first-person narrative from a female perspective?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Starnone gave me a hard stare. I could feel the tension. Then, unexpectedly, he gave one of his wide disarming smiles. “It depends on the writer’s mimetic ability, which is one of the crucial elements of storytelling,” he started. According to Starnone, a good writer is one who can put him or herself in anyone’s shoes. The written word can speak the voice of anything, “even the flickering flame of a burning match”.</p>
<p>The metaphor was powerful. A flickering flame: one moment it’s there and the next it isn’t. Like the face and gender of the author Elena Ferrante.</p>
<h2>Borderless, plural, posthuman</h2>
<p>My personal research on <a href="https://www.academia.edu/35151997/Elena_Ferrante_e_la_questione_dellidentit%C3%A0">Ferrante’s notion of identity</a> combines well with Starnone’s discourse on the importance of empathy to negotiate “otherness”. To create convincing characters, Starnone seems to argue, writers must be able to feel what others feel, think what others think – “become” others, if only on paper.</p>
<p>Equally, in Ferrante – as I contend in an <a href="https://www.academia.edu/30877833/Performative_Realism_and_Post-humanism_in_The_Days_of_Abandonment">in-depth study</a> of her work – the “I” is always defined via a relationship with a “you” and therefore identity is always relational. Furthermore, the “you” in question might not be another human being but also an animal, an object, the environment, or a technological device. This special type of empathy between human and nonhuman entities gives birth to a new identity which is not just “relational” but indeed posthuman.</p>
<p>To understand how we are becoming posthuman, think of the ways smartphones and social media are shaping our daily lives so that we are constantly connected with others by means of technology. Think how emotionally bound we are to pets and animals whose status of creatures with feelings might <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-an-australian-first-the-act-may-legally-recognise-animals-feelings-111079">soon be legally recognised</a>. Or think how the debate on climate change is affecting our eating habits, social behaviour and even our reproductive ethos, as shown by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/birthstrikers-meet-the-women-who-refuse-to-have-children-until-climate-change-ends">birth-strikers</a> (women who are refusing to have children because of climate change).</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/281752/original/file-20190628-94712-228esb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the topic of posthuman identity, I have edited a forthcoming volume of collected essays, [<a href="https://www.academia.edu/39716338/Posthumanism_in_Italian_Literature_and_Film._Boundaries_and_Identity_edited_by_Enrica_Maria_Ferrara._New_York_Palgrave_Macmillan_forthcoming_">Posthumanism in Italian Literary and Film. Boundaries and Identity</a>]. In my chapter on Ferrante I explain why the symbiotic relationship between the two friends Elena and Lina, protagonists of My Brilliant Friend (also now a successful <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/27/my-brilliant-friend-tv-series-elena-ferrante">television series</a>) may be defined as “posthuman”.</p>
<p>Elena and Lina’s identities are so closely bound to one another and to the porous Neapolitan landscape – described, at times, as an unstable mass of flesh, objects, inert matter, energy, blood, lava – that often readers and viewers are left wondering whether the two characters are in fact just one: the dyad Elena-Lina.</p>
<p>Through this loss of boundaries between the two characters and their surroundings, Ferrante intends to bring attention to the unsettling matter of a crumbling, fragmented world without margins, a world in which singular identity feels constantly threatened by the “other” – man, woman, avatar, the animal, the environment.</p>
<p>What is Ferrante’s answer to this threat? How does she advise us to counteract our fear of a borderless world in which the identity of the human is at risk of vanishing? </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/elena-ferrante-has-her-reasons-for-anonymity-we-should-respect-them-66436">Elena Ferrante has her reasons for anonymity – we should respect them</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<p>Rather than suggesting that we die, destroy ourselves or disappear, like Lina in the Neapolitan quartet, Ferrante alludes to the fact that we are done with individualism and its notion of borders. If our identity is constantly redefined through dialogue with others, individuals and their names no longer matter. Our collaborative effort is what matters, our empathy with others – whether it’s humans, nonhuman animals, the environment or even our technological avatars.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118138/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Enrica Maria Ferrara does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How important is the identity of an author? Can a novelist ever really ‘become’ someone else?Enrica Maria Ferrara, Lecturer/Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, University College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/641562016-10-20T19:16:51Z2016-10-20T19:16:51ZFriday essay: why literary celebrity is a double-edged sword<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142285/original/image-20161019-20333-u5msmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A wax model of Ernest Hemingway at Madame Tussauds in New York.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anton_Ivanov/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1967, French theorist Roland Barthes famously <a href="http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/barthes.death.pdf">declared</a> the metaphorical “death of the author” in his essay of the same name. Barthes rejected the Romantic idea of the author as a unique figure of genius. Still, despite his best efforts, this romantic notion of the heroic, solitary wordsmith lives on today. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1319.html">Medieval times</a>, authors were seen as nothing more than craftsmen. But the Romantic poets – Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley – singled out the writer as a figure of “spontaneous creativity”. As academic Clara Tuite <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/210888">has noted</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Romantic period saw the birth of the literary celebrity, a figure distinguishable from the merely famous author by his or her status as a cultural commodity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Romantic writer was seen as either a solitary hero, a tragic artist, a melancholy genius - or all three. In the centuries since, famous authors have been both celebrated and panned, adored and ridiculed. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142299/original/image-20161019-20316-e1o1li.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lord Byron (1788-1824), engraved by H.Robinson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Georgios Kollidas</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since Romantic times, we have often expected writers to be detached from the trappings of celebrity culture, aligning their integrity with an anti-commercial attitude. There is, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Star_Authors.html?id=QFcqYIHCfgAC">argues author Joe Moran</a>, a “nostalgia for some kind of transcendent, anti-economic, creative element in a secular, debased, commercialised culture” that we commonly attach to writers.
Indeed theorist Lorraine York <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Literary_Celebrity_in_Canada.html?id=_5HhaFex8BsC&redir_esc=y">has asked</a> if we can even use words like “fame” and “celebrity” to describe writers, “those notorious privacy-seeking, solitary scribblers”. </p>
<p>One of the first to question the idea of literary celebrity was the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who found his own fame something of a burden.
More recently, authors such as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers have struggled with the desire for popularity and credibility. In today’s internet culture, reaction to a famous writer’s actions or utterances is quick and merciless. Next week, a new author will be thrust into the media spotlight, with the announcement of <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/fiction">the Booker Prize winner</a>. </p>
<p>Yet interestingly, discussions about the difficulties of being a famous writer rarely include women. The notion of the solitary genius is usually attached to men. A notable exception is the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante – who is famous, ironically, precisely because of her reluctance to engage with literary celebrity. Ferrante writes under a pseudonym, in her words, to “liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety”. </p>
<p>Ferrante’s recent unmasking by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/03/elena-ferrante-anita-raja-unmasking-publisher-outing-my-brilliant-friend">a literary journalist</a> has unleashed a torrent of condemnation. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"784869671145054208"}"></div></p>
<p>The extent to which her true identity has been picked over shows how our society craves constant closure, often at the expense of creativity and imagination. As Michel Foucault once <a href="http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/foucault.author.pdf">noted</a>, literary anonymity is “of interest only as a puzzle to be solved”. </p>
<p>Such is the nature of contemporary celebrity culture that many cannot tolerate the idea of writers who prefer anonymity over fame. So those such as Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger and Ferrante, who have evaded the limelight, have been scrutinised as much for their personal lives as their actual works. </p>
<h2>A short history of famous (male) writers</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142289/original/image-20161019-20330-15h0a68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Russian stamp showing Charles Dickens on his 150th birth anniversary.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Olga Popova / Shutterstock.com</span></span>
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<p>The 19th century writers Charles Dickens (hero of the working class) and Mark Twain (America’s most beloved humourist), were plagued with aspects of their fame. While Dickens was often criticised for appealing to the lower classes, Twain <a href="http://www.twainquotes.com/Celebrity.html">likened</a> celebrities to clowns. Celebrity, he said, “is what a boy or a youth longs for more than for any other thing. He would be a clown in a circus […] he would sell himself to Satan, in order to attract attention and be talked about and envied”.</p>
<p>Yet Dickens and Twain also enjoyed their fame. Dickens was renowned for engaging his audiences at public lectures; Twain also went on speaking tours. </p>
<p>If we fast forward half a century or so, we come to Ernest Hemingway – another author who felt imprisoned by his fame. As theorist Leo Braudy <a href="http://leobraudy.com/the-frenzy-of-renown-fame-and-its-history/">puts it</a>, Hemingway was caught between “his genius and its publicity”. In an undated writing fragment, Hemingway <a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Glow-in-the-dark+authors%3A%22+Hemingway's+celebrity+and+legacy+in+under...-a0246955529">wrote</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have reached the point where we are ruled by photographers and agents of publishers and writing is no longer of any importance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He also called fellow writer F. Scott Fitzgerald a “hack” for writing Hollywood screenplays.</p>
<p>Yet Hemingway nevertheless helped promote the “Hemingway myth”, built around ideals of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7096913-all-man">masculinity</a> and genius. He was frequently photographed outdoors, fishing and hunting, or attending bullfights. </p>
<p>Then there was Norman Mailer, the pugnacious, Jewish author of The Naked and the Dead and Advertisements for Myself. In 1960, Mailer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/arts/adele-mailer-artist-who-married-norman-mailer-dies-at-90.html?_r=0">stabbed and seriously wounded his then-wife, Adele Morales</a> with a pen-knife at a drunken party. (After pleading guilty to a charge of third-degree assault, he received a suspended sentence.)</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142282/original/image-20161019-20324-fg6cqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=627&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Norman Mailer receives an Austrian decoration for science and art in 2002.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Leonard Foeger/Reuters</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Mailer cultivated a public persona that certainly boosted his fame, but did little for his literary reputation. Many critics accused him of wasting his talents by shamelessly promoting himself; he did frequent TV interviews, including a particularly notorious <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw">appearance</a> on The Dick Cavett Show, where he and Gore Vidal famously butted heads over Mailer’s public profile and ego. </p>
<p>Indeed, Mailer once <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005907&content=reviews">called himself</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and status.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Theorist John Cawelti suggests that unlike Hemingway, who lived out to the end an ambiguous conflict between celebrity and art, Mailer “tried to make his public performances themselves into a kind of artistic exploration”. Mailer frequently wrote about himself in the third-person, in an effort to “perform” himself as a character. </p>
<p>Interestingly, at the same time as all this was happening, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/jd-salinger-9470070">J.D. Salinger</a>, author of <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5107.The_Catcher_in_the_Rye">The Catcher in the Rye</a>, famously was living as a recluse. </p>
<h2>Franzen and Oprah</h2>
<p>In 2001, Oprah Winfrey put Jonathan Franzen’s sprawling family saga <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3805.The_Corrections?from_search=true">The Corrections</a> on her <a href="https://static.oprah.com/images/o2/201608/201608-obc-complete-list-01a.pdf">book club list</a>, encouraging her audience to read it. Franzen was invited onto Oprah’s show. He declined, <a href="http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/jonathan-franzen-uncorrected/">saying</a> he didn’t want his novel placed alongside “schmaltzy, one-dimensional [books]”. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wolf Gang/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Franzen was widely panned for being a snob. Andre Dubus III, for instance, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/29/books/oprah-gaffe-by-franzen-draws-ire-and-sales.html?pagewanted=all">criticised</a> Franzen’s assumption that “high art is not for the masses, that they won’t understand it and don’t deserve it”. </p>
<p>Media scholar Ian Collinson <a href="https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/everyday-readers-reading-popular-culture-ian-collinson/">sees</a> Franzen’s reaction as a symbolic attempt to separate the television celebrity from the novel, an act of “cultural decontamination”. Franzen, he writes, feared his position within the high-art tradition “would be compromised if his novel were subject to such blatant commercialism”.</p>
<p>Yet nine years later, Franzen <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/16/oprah-winfrey-jonathan-franzen-freedom">apologised</a> to Oprah. He was again invited onto her show, this time to promote his 2010 book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7905092-freedom">Freedom</a>. He did not refuse a second time. Ironically, many criticised Franzen for succumbing to the allure of popularity. The old assumptions regarding the incompatibility of literature and celebrity resurfaced, with one critic, Macy Halford, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/franzen-meets-oprah">suggesting</a> that “Oprah and Franzen are not terribly compatible personalities”. </p>
<p>This whole saga attests to what Tessa Roynon <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/cambridge-introduction-toni-morrison-1">has called</a> the “damned if you don’t, damned if you do” mentality of literary celebrity. Authors are often seen as having to choose between respectability amongst fewer critics, or widespread popularity at the expense of their reputations. (<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/06/literary-celebrity">One article</a> about a speech Franzen gave to students in 2011 was memorably titled, “Touching the hem of Mr Franzen’s garment.”)
Like Mailer, Franzen’s career has been marred by the troubled union between mass media presence and desire for literary acceptance. </p>
<h2>Celebrity and Sincerity: Wallace and Eggers</h2>
<p>One of Franzen’s peers, the late David Foster Wallace, was an author in the Romantic mould; he is associated with the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/sincerity-not-irony-is-our-ages-ethos/265466/">“New Sincerity”</a> literary movement, and his 1996 novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6759.Infinite_Jest?from_search=true">Infinite Jest</a> has been judged by many as a work of genius. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=897&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142298/original/image-20161019-20336-13tkw4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A hand-drawn tribute to David Foster Wallace.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Steve Rhodes/flickr</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>In 2008, Wallace took his own life. Before his death, Wallace was known to have suffered from depression, and he projected an image of the melancholy genius. His opinion of celebrity was less than favourable. His widow Karen Green once <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview">noted</a> in an interview that all of the media attention given to Wallace “turns him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him wince”.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/reviews/wallace-v-profile.html">1996 New York Times piece</a>, Wallace claimed that the “hoopla” of celebrity made him want to become a recluse. The cult of celebrity was something he consistently mocked in his work, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/365145-the-paradoxical-intercourse-of-audience-and-celebrity-the-suppressed-awareness-that">calling</a> celebrities “symbols of themselves” rather than real people. As with Rousseau and Salinger, the logic went that Wallace “deserved his celebrity”, journalist Megan Garber <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/david-foster-wallace-the-end-of-the-tour/400928/">writes</a>, specifically because he had not sought it.</p>
<p>Dave Eggers is also part of the “New Sincerity” movement. A writer of serious, sentimental fiction, his books include his debut memoir <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4953.A_Heartbreaking_Work_of_Staggering_Genius?from_search=true">A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius</a>, and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4952.What_Is_the_What?from_search=true">What is the What?</a>, the fictionalised story of the life of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. Eggers also opened the writing centre <a href="http://826valencia.org/about/">Valencia 826</a> in San Francisco, which helps children develop their writing skills (and inspired the <a href="http://www.sydneystoryfactory.org.au/our-inspiration/">Sydney Story Factory</a> and Melbourne’s <a href="http://www.100storybuilding.org.au/">100 Story Building</a>.)</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142291/original/image-20161019-20302-1xjeoh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=707&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dave Eggers in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elliot Margolies/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Early in his career, Eggers often spoke of wanting to retreat into anonymity. Instead, he <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">seized</a> the reins of literary celebrity. Some then accused him of hypocrisy – in criticising fame while also inviting it. He has also been criticised for “excessive sincerity”, while journalist David Kirkpatrick <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/books/ambivalent-writer-turns-his-memoir-upside-down-denouncing-profits-publishers.html">called</a> Eggers “agonizingly ambivalent”. </p>
<p>Journalist James Sullivan <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Eggers-Surprised-By-Success-Author-to-read-from-2935959.php">notes</a> that Eggers</p>
<blockquote>
<p>treats his celebrity like a gold lamé suit: It’s amusing, absurd and, in his mind, not quite appropriate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, in her reading of Eggers’ 2003 book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4954.You_Shall_Know_Our_Velocity_?from_search=true">You Shall Know Our Velocity</a>, Caroline Hamilton <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">suggests</a> that the central characters “resemble the credibility-obsessed younger Eggers torn between longing for celebrity and legitimacy”. </p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html">2000 email interview</a>, Eggers referred to himself as a sellout for having sold many books and appeared in various magazines. As Hamilton <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/one-man-zeitgeist-dave-eggers-publishing-and-publicity-9781441117373/">writes</a>, the term sellout has less to do with wealth, and more to do with “the popularity that comes with it”.
Celebrity, then, remains a problem for those authors wishing to appear genuine and serious. </p>
<h2>Where are all the women?</h2>
<p>It is striking that female authors are, for the most part, excluded from all these agonised discussions about inner turmoil and perceived loss of prestige. This suggests that women are not often thought of as having substantial reputations in the first place. </p>
<p>Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, for instance, has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jw0Fu8nhOc">frequently appeared</a> on Oprah’s program to discuss her complex, poetically written, novels. In contrast to Franzen, however, Morrison’s credibility was never seen to be compromised in doing so. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142294/original/image-20161019-20330-gdzkaa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Toni Morrison after being awarded the French Legion of Honour in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Philippe Wojazer/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite the number of talented women writing today for large audiences – Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison just to name a few – critics do not often think of female authors as having the kinds of monumental reputations that their male peers possess. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero">The Byronic hero</a>, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/5771776/Remembering_Hemingway_The_Endurance_of_the_Hemingway_Myth">the Hemingway legend</a>, and the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/09/13/behind_the_david_foster_wallace_myth/">Foster Wallace genius</a> are larger-than-life men. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142305/original/image-20161019-20333-y1kpvb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margaret Atwood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Blinch/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Women are seldom discussed in such a way – with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Yet this may actually be a blessing for them. Avoiding the expectations that go along with literary celebrity can be an advantage. Female authors may be better able to breach certain boundaries – of genre, style, content – in ways that certain male authors cannot. </p>
<p>Ferrante, for instance, said she explicitly needed anonymity to write honestly. While some may see it as a bizarre sort of compliment to her that she is so intriguing that an Italian journalist spent weeks combing financial and property records to unmask her, she surely deserved the right to her privacy to focus on her own work. </p>
<p>Some of the most interesting genre-defying authors writing today are women such as Morrison, Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel. Perhaps, then, female authors can more seamlessly defy stringent boundaries that continue to define the literary world when they are not hailed as heroic geniuses.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64156/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Siobhan Lyons does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>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.Siobhan Lyons, Tutor in Media and Cultural Studies, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/665002016-10-05T13:42:23Z2016-10-05T13:42:23ZElena Ferrante, Charlotte Brontë and how anonymity protects against female writing stereotypes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140489/original/image-20161005-14232-1xsaih6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The gender of the writer can cause some readers to change their analysis of a novel.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/130588691@N03/16548682572">Liz Lux/Flickr.com</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the New York Review of Books, investigative journalist Claudio Gatti <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/02/elena-ferrante-an-answer/">claimed to have uncovered</a> author Elena Ferrante’s true identity. Ferrante, the writer behind bestselling Neapolitan crime novels, has until now been <a href="https://theconversation.com/successfully-absent-elena-ferrantes-italian-books-46605">famously anonymous</a>, giving interviews via email, her true identity known only to her publisher.</p>
<p>In many respects, Ferrante’s story mirrors that of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. The Brontë sisters published their novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall under the masculine pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/03/elena-ferrante-in-her-own-words-to-relinquish-my-anonymity-would-be-very-painful">Like Ferrante</a>, they published under pen names to ensure their privacy and to eschew celebrity. In an interview earlier this year, Ferrante stated that she chose to write under a pseudonym so she could “concentrate exclusively and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/elena-ferrante-anonymity-lets-me-concentrate-exclusively-on-writing">with complete freedom</a> on writing and its strategies”.</p>
<p>The Brontës wrote as men because their novels examined subject matter which was “unfeminine” for their early Victorian readers: sexual passion, slang, alcoholism, domestic abuse and violence. Nevertheless, commentators were quick to accuse the “Brothers Bell” of being women writers, or equally using their writings to affirm that they must be male. Mr Rochester’s slang and sexual exploits were said to prove Jane Eyre’s male authorship, while the detailed evocation of Jane’s psychology and emotions gave away the woman’s hand in the novel.</p>
<h2>Quiet notoriety</h2>
<p>In the beginning, even the sisters’ publishers did not know the true identity of their suddenly notorious authors. When an American publisher stated that Anne’s novel, Agnes Grey, and Emily’s Wuthering Heights had both been written by the author of Jane Eyre, Charlotte and Anne made a whirlwind journey to London to prove their separate identities. Charlotte famously declared: “We are three sisters”. While Charlotte partially embraced her fame, Emily was upset by her tactics, desiring only to be known as “Ellis Bell”, a male author. As the work of women writers, the novels were deemed <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Bront%C3%ABs.html?id=CV8P1Lt3-s4C">“coarse” and “brutal”</a>, the writers themselves “nearly unsexed”.</p>
<p>The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell took part in the parlour game of guessing who the Bells really were. When she discovered the truth, she <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ESH22a2yaWoC&pg=PA289&lpg=PA289&dq=%22Currer+Bell+(aha!+what+will+you+give+me+for+a+secret?)+She%E2%80%99s+a+she%22&source=bl&ots=Qh0yHx0HmV&sig=ThiB7qdnNvT0WhyfmqAkAG7wWn8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMlfSAvsPPAhXkCcAKHYmmAD0Q6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=%22Currer%20Bell%20(aha!%20what%20will%20you%20give%20me%20for%20a%20secret%3F)%20She%E2%80%99s%20a%20she%22&f=false">wrote a triumphant letter</a> to a friend: “Currer Bell (aha! what will you give me for a secret?) She’s a she”. In writing The Life of Charlotte Brontë, following Charlotte’s early death in 1855, Gaskell strategically positioned Charlotte as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/mar/25/classics.charlottebronte">pious and self-sacrificing daughter</a>, as well as a talented novelist.</p>
<p>Gaskell’s biography also began a trend that haunts the Brontës to this day. She located the “originals” of the characters and locales in the Brontës’ novels in the people and geography of their native Yorkshire. The Brontës’ novels have been read through their lives ever since. These readings deny the Brontës’ genius, imagination, and literary skill.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140491/original/image-20161005-14236-haiq0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140491/original/image-20161005-14236-haiq0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140491/original/image-20161005-14236-haiq0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140491/original/image-20161005-14236-haiq0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140491/original/image-20161005-14236-haiq0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140491/original/image-20161005-14236-haiq0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140491/original/image-20161005-14236-haiq0n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charlotte Bronte AKA Currer Bell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-252139606/stock-photo-charlotte-bronte-1816-1855-british-author-engraving-from-an-original-painting-by-alonzo-chappel-printed-in-the-early-1870s.html?src=BWDaYLAJssFiwxyh0kmf6w-1-0">Everett Historical/www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Anonymous no more</h2>
<p>Many commentators have <a href="https://theconversation.com/elena-ferrante-has-her-reasons-for-anonymity-we-should-respect-them-66436">denounced Gatti’s investigations</a>, citing Ferrante’s desire for anonymity and privacy. In an age of unparalleled access to authors -– through social media and at literary festivals –- perhaps it seemed inevitable that Ferrante’s identity would eventually be found out, unthinkable that an author could hide away in obscurity forever. </p>
<p>The Brontë sisters had more control over who knew their secret than Ferrante has done. The critic George Henry Lewes, later to become the partner of novelist George Eliot, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/review-of-jane-eyre-by-george-henry-lewes">praised Jane Eyre in print</a> and corresponded with “Currer Bell”. But Lewes <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjJxqPItMPPAhVFLsAKHYHEBoYQFgg6MAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fopenjournals.library.usyd.edu.au%2Findex.php%2FSSE%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F378%2F349&usg=AFQjCNEeK6XttDdXveRGhwRiII_QJXR7EA">earned Charlotte’s scorn</a> when he criticised her second novel, Shirley, as the product of a woman’s pen, after learning she was a clergyman’s daughter. Charlotte responded with a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ESH22a2yaWoC&dq=%22Currer+Bell+(aha!+what+will+you+give+me+for+a+secret%3F)+She%E2%80%99s+a+she%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s">blistering one-line note</a>: “I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”.</p>
<p>Ferrante’s story raises important questions about how we read and value women’s writing and authorship. Ferrante has stated that in part she wants to protect the Neapolitan community she writes about in her novels, just as Charlotte wanted to write about Yorkshire clergymen she knew without fear of discovery. The latter failed. Haworth locals gleefully identified some of the characters drawn from life in Shirley. If known, with a past to be examined, Ferrante’s novels could be subjected to the flattening biographical readings the Brontës’ works have long been subjected to. </p>
<p>Up until now, as an unknown literary quantity, Ferrante has also avoided having her work put into the boxes unfairly reserved for women writers – romance and chick lit. Her in-depth examinations of womens’ lives and friendships have been taken seriously. The cultural critic Lili Loofbourow has argued that Ferrante’s “pseudonymity was a <a href="https://twitter.com/Millicentsomer/status/782708876806266880">gift to her readers</a>. She inoculated us against the urge to reduce her work to her femaleness, family, biography.”</p>
<p>The Brontës’ novels were disturbing and innovative on first publication, but now are sometimes seen merely as semi-autobiographical romances, partly as a result of their Hollywood film adaptations. However, since Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic was published in 1979, the sisters’ novels have been revisited as feminist critiques and as works of literary genius – though it took more than 100 years after initial publication of the Brontës’ fiction.</p>
<p>How Elena Ferrante’s works will be received now that their author is, perhaps, known, is yet to be seen. The Brontës’ story could serve as a warning never to lose sight of the work itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66500/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erin Nyborg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The unmasking of Charlotte Brontë changed the way that her books were read.Erin Nyborg, Researcher and Tutor, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/664562016-10-05T06:50:26Z2016-10-05T06:50:26Z‘Uncovering’ Elena Ferrante, and the importance of a woman’s voice<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140451/original/image-20161005-22924-k77yp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">One of the questions most discussed on Italian social media is whether the same thing would have happened to a male writer who had made the same choice for privacy.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dawolf/10042583466/">dawolf-/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Italian journalist Claudio Gatti has <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/02/elena-ferrante-an-answer/">published new allegations</a> about the identity of the novelist who goes by the name of Elena Ferrante. </p>
<p>But there’s something no tax details, no prying into financial affairs, no invasion of privacy or the truth and no trace of marital or patriarchal support can ever take away from Elena Ferrante or her readers - and that is the author’s avowedly female viewpoint.</p>
<h2>The female gaze</h2>
<p>It doesn’t matter whether the “real” Ferrante is a woman, a man or transgender; whether she is heterosexual or homosexual; an individual human being or a collective. What matters is that in the years when she wrote her first three novels - <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/290186.Troubling_Love?from_search=true">Troubling Love</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77810.The_Days_of_Abandonment?from_search=true">The Days of Abandonment</a> and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1058564.The_Lost_Daughter?from_search=true">The Lost Daughter</a> - when her readers were few and success unpredictable, she chose to identify as a woman writer. </p>
<p>She has continued to do so in all her public statements and in the self-commentary that appears her collection of autobiographical non-fiction writing <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32325555-frantumaglia?from_search=true">Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey</a>.</p>
<p>This is no easy choice in a country like Italy, where male-dominated journalism, publishing, and academia denies visibility – and I should add respect – to women writers, despite a long stream of extraordinary women of letters. Nonetheless, Ferrante has chosen to identify as a woman. </p>
<p>In essence, this means that, for a long time, the author chose to count for less: she’s had fewer opportunities for publication; she’s been labelled as a writer of sentimental novels aimed at a female readership; and she’s been ignored by cultural reviews.</p>
<p>Not only in her novels but also in numerous articles and in correspondence, she has chosen to depict the world from a female point of view. Ferrante has always implicitly claimed that the woman’s gaze is decisive. </p>
<p>Ferrante’s Italian readers are aware of this heritage. On <a href="https://www.afp.com/en/news/828/writers-privacy-row-erupts-italys-ferrante-unmasked">social media and in newspapers</a> right now, a protest is spreading against what’s being called a “safari”, or the “ruthless pursuit” of Ferrante. This pursuit that has failed to clarify anything about the writer and her novels while undoubtedly violating her right to privacy. </p>
<p>One of the questions most discussed on Italian social media is whether the same thing would have <a href="https://abbattoimuri.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/di-elena-ferrante-e-dello-scoop-dello-sherlock-holmes-de-noiantri/">happened to a successful male writer</a> who had made the same choice of confidentiality, of privacy.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"783216813475766272"}"></div></p>
<p><em>Translation: Many women (readers, writers, journalists) from abroad speak of a patriarchal attack on the choices of an author.</em></p>
<p>The answer is almost certainly no, or at least not in this violent form, in this punitive way. Italian readers share <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/10/story-old-name-why-readers-reject-sexist-unmasking-elena-ferrante">concerns voiced internationally</a> about how this journalistic investigation was handled. </p>
<h2>The author is not dead?</h2>
<p>There’s another feature Italian readers share with the writer’s other fans from across the world, and that’s their hunger to find reality in fiction. This need often becomes so pressing that readers abolish the barrier between truth and fiction, and attribute the events and experiences of fictional characters to the author’s life. </p>
<p>Something similar happens in Ferrante’s work, only with an added ingredient. Elena Ferrante’s entire writing is governed by the suspicion that weighs on much fiction: a suspicion that it is invented and therefore artificial, unnecessary, not directly reflecting real life, lived experience or our identities. </p>
<p>But Ferrante is saved from this suspicion of artificiality because her anonymity allows readers to attribute the narrated events to her life. We know that Ferrante has maintained her anonymity for diametrically opposed reasons: to call attention to the value of the written text as autonomous and beyond the empirical author who produced it, and to reject any form of exhibitionism in the author, undermining any equivalence between literature and show business. </p>
<p>But, absurdly, her desire for her fiction to stand alone doesn’t count. Indeed, Ferrante’s anonymity has had precisely the opposite effect by imposing a link between her secret identity and narrative fiction. </p>
<p>Ferrante’s fictional narrative evokes the powerful fantasy of a memoir, a continuous connection between her life and works. Her writing is thus paradoxically considered an infinite memoir, because every fragment testifies doubly to a life lived and a life yet to be lived (to be invented), and can continuously stimulate the process of readers’ identification of one with the other. </p>
<p>If this is true of all of her novels, it applies even more so to the so-called Neapolitan novels: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13586707-my-brilliant-friend">My Brilliant Friend</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465515-the-story-of-a-new-name">The Story of a New Name</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23156040-those-who-leave-and-those-who-stay">Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay</a>, and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25242224-the-story-of-the-lost-child?from_search=true">The Story of the Lost Child</a>. </p>
<p>These four volumes do not feature the systematic use of flashbacks that was the narrative technique of Ferrante’s first three novels. Instead, time acts as a record, as a transcript of even minute events. Meaning is created by the progression of time that dictates the pace of the formative years of the two friends. </p>
<p>The realistic style of this female friendship saga has the effect of abolishing the border between artifice and reality. Ferrante thus situates her writing at the margins between fiction and memoir, and explains the continuous seepage between the two.</p>
<p>We do not know whether Ferrante is going to write any more or not, but she will certainly continue to resist the assimilation of literature into the logic of show business. Thanks to Gatti’s investigation, her many readers in Italy and elsewhere seem to have discovered that while their hunger for reality might be a legitimate desire, it can never be satisfied by the violation of Ferrante’s privacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66456/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tiziana De Rogatis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>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.Tiziana De Rogatis, Associate Professor, Università per Stranieri di SienaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/664362016-10-03T17:23:03Z2016-10-03T17:23:03ZElena Ferrante has her reasons for anonymity – we should respect them<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140175/original/image-20161003-27269-ngwk5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The acclaimed Neapolitan series.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was always going to happen wasn’t it? After several abortive cracks at “identification” on the part of finicky scholarly detectives, the journalist Claudio Gatti says he’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/02/elena-ferrante-literary-storm-as-italian-reporter-identifies-author">finally put a finger on the real name behind Elena Ferrante</a>. Break out the bubbly? I certainly won’t be celebrating.</p>
<p>The dust from the media storm will take a while to settle. The history of anonymous authorship is also a history of triumphalist “unmasking” at the hands of self-appointed public servants who assume the right to trumpet the spoiler – and who also, if there is justice in the world, tend to suffer their own exposure as the parasitic charlatans they often are. </p>
<p>Gatti thinks he has unmasked the “real author” of Ferrante’s acclaimed books – something that has been the subject of much speculation in the past – but even were this latest round of revelation to turn out to be “true”, there are bigger fish to fry here. The violation of anonymity brings with it, kicking and screaming in Gatti’s face, a host of problems at the heart of power and identity. This is an ethical, political, but also a literary issue of the deepest concern to all of us.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"782834615232892928"}"></div></p>
<p>I work on the nameless literature of 2,000 years ago. You don’t have to tell me twice that there are a bunch of reasons why authors opt, sometimes need, to remain anonymous or pseudonymous. The range of these reasons usually meshes with the grids of historical context. There have been periods of history where the branding of an authorial name was abnormal and inauspicious, because authorship was not about claiming individual authority. Then there have been moments of danger where authors have had to abolish or toggle their names for fear of reprisal. </p>
<p>Ferrante – and we should continue calling her Ferrante – writes in several traditions of anonymity. All of them have radical political roots, ambitions, and effects. We could fit her into the <a href="http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/englishmenu.htm">tradition of Wu-Ming</a>, the (originally) anonymous group of broadly Marxist cultural guerrillas, who messed around bracingly with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/31/featuresreviews.guardianreview11">collective authorship</a>. Better, however, to think of Ferrante as one of the great warriors in the long line of women who have made active use of, or sometimes had no other choice than to employ, anonymous publication. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/roomofonesown/section3.rhtml">A Room of One’s Own</a>, Virginia Woolf observed that for most women writers up to her time – for example Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand – anonymity was a kind of dictate born of a patriarchal compunction to chastity and self-effacement. She goes on: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thus they [Currer Bell et al] did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Manifesto for anonymity</h2>
<p>What’s changed since 1929 is that publicity in women is no longer detestable. What hasn’t changed is that it is overwhelmingly men who get to set the terms of that publicity, not to mention make capital from it. Ferrante’s experiment is a radical and urgent attempt to take charge of anonymity, in a history that has always made it non-negotiable. Gatti’s act of “exposure” and “unveiling” – no matter how much he protests that an author’s identity is in the public domain – is a reactionary bid for repossession. </p>
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<p>“Unveiling” is the traditional moment a man claims his bride by revealing her identity. Gatti could have looked no further than Ferrante’s fiction to find that it is all about this moment of revelation and repossession. It is full of the hostile threats and acts of male renaming. In the Neapolitan novels, Lina chafes under the story of her new name, her marriage to the oafish Stefano Carracci. </p>
<p>But there are so many other moments in the series where the narrator Elena claims her writing with her own name, only to have it blow up in her face. Her first signed article is sabotaged by her future lover Nino, chucked in the bin before it can get to press. Her first book, based on personal experience even though she changes all the character names, is inevitably read autobiographically, with social fallout for its author. Her final collaboration with Lina, a written denunciation of the Solara gang which doesn’t shrink from naming names, only puts her in danger – and doesn’t make any inroads into the male violence set to repeat itself with geological certainty. The books contain their own manifesto for anonymity.</p>
<h2>Off-the-record</h2>
<p>Gatti’s “unveiling” shows that respect for anonymity only counts in certain spheres – his whole edifice depends on the information of an “anonymous source” whose name we may not see anytime soon. But in the end, this is not so much a privacy issue as it is a political one. This is about who owns Elena Ferrante. It is about allowing or denying the author the space to complete her incredible work of invisibility beyond the paparazzi apparatus, beyond the frontline lenses of patriarchy and capitalism.</p>
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<p>The two protagonists of the series have very different approaches to authorship. Lenù prefers to sign her name to her own work; Lila prefers to destroy the products of her own hand. The series’ final scene plays with that power of self-destruction – a literary effect much more potent than self-commemoration (if you haven’t read it yet, I won’t spoil it for you). </p>
<p>We should not interfere with Ferrante’s right in life – or Lina’s in literature – to disappear without a trace.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66436/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thanks to Professor Emily Greenwood for mentioning the Virginia Woolf passage in her St Andrews Classics Research Seminar, September 16, 2016.</span></em></p>The unmasking of the real author of the Neapolitan series was an act of vandalism.Tom Geue, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of St AndrewsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/466052015-09-06T20:09:08Z2015-09-06T20:09:08ZSuccessfully absent: Elena Ferrante’s Italian books<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93705/original/image-20150903-24469-5wlleu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=36%2C159%2C890%2C557&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elena Ferrante's searing portraits of women have won her international acclaim, though very little is known about the author herself.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Italian novelist <a href="http://elenaferrante.com/">Elena Ferrante</a> is a cult author. She is defined as “one of the great novelists of our time” in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/books/review/the-story-of-the-lost-child-by-elena-ferrante.html?_r=0">The New York Times Book Review</a>, “the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of” in <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21587190-singular-voice-english-last-see-naples-and-die">The Economist</a>, and “one of Italy’s finest novelists” in the <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1342444.ece">Times Literary Supplement</a>, and so on and so forth. </p>
<p>She is also known for fiercely protecting her true identity. </p>
<p>We know she was born in Naples, studied classics, her favourite Italian novelist is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Morante">Elsa Morante</a>; she discovered the pleasure of telling stories when she was 13. We also know she has humble origins, she has a day job (other than writing), and feminist thinkers from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray">Irigaray</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriana_Cavarero">Cavarero</a>, to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway">Haraway</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Butler">Butler</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosi_Braidotti">Braidotti</a> have influenced her writing. Her international popularity has been growing since 2005 when her books began being translated into English. Her <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/my-brilliant-friend">Neapolitan Novels</a> are now an enormous success. </p>
<p>She is, nevertheless, intangible. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym that has been protecting her identity for more than 20 years. Information on how and why she writes is cautiously scattered across only written interviews (as in <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante">The Paris Review</a> and <a href="http://www.vogue.com/983355/elena-ferrante-neapolitan-novels-origin-those-who-leave-and-those-who-stay/">Vogue</a>, or the collected letters and notes in her <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jun/12/elena-ferrante-writer-italian-novelist">La Frantumaglia </a>(2003).</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93706/original/image-20150903-24512-hf87ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span></span>
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<p>Elena Ferrante published her first book, Troubling Love, in 1992, followed by The Days of Abandonment (2002) and The Lost Daughter (2008). Through an often violent, carnal language Ferrante narrates complex, gripping, passionate stories of women: daughters, mothers, abandoned or abused wives, lovers, adolescent girls, friends of other women, and writers. </p>
<p>Her female protagonists are repressed by their men and the environment. At the same time, they are uncontrollable rebels, resisting conventional models of femininity. Ferrante’s narrating “I” is always a woman (Leda, Delia, Olga or Elena) and – supposedly - her books are inspired from experiences, people and places from her childhood. </p>
<p>In 2011 Ferrante started her popular Neapolitan quadrilogy – My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay (2014), and the latest, The Story of the Lost Child (2015). These books tell the lives and consuming friendship of Elena and Lila, against the backdrop of social and political upheaval in Italy from the 1950s to the present day (with a particular attention to the social tensions of the 1960s and 1970s). </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93708/original/image-20150903-24467-1i0raru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span></span>
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<p>In around 1,700 pages we follow Elena and Lila from their adolescence, growing up in a poor crime-infested area of Naples, through years of love affairs, unsatisfying marriages, and tortuous careers. Their inextricable, intense and mysterious friendship resists disillusionment, treachery, and mental illness. </p>
<p>The novels are easy to read and one is carried away by a prose that is solid, lucid and controlled, without any of the excessive embellishment many contemporary Italian writers are often accused of employing. </p>
<p>The first three volumes of the Neapolitan series have sold around 130,000 in the United States and similarly in Italy where reviews are favourable and appreciative. Yet, most of her popularity has been abroad where they are published by <a href="http://www.europaeditions.com/">Europa Editions </a>(owned by Edizioni E/O, Ferrante’s Italian publishing house) in New York, and distributed by Melbourne-based <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/">Text Publishing</a> in Australia.</p>
<p>Why are Ferrante’s books so successful? Her novels are pleasant to read through the brilliant translation of Ann Goldstein. In between soap opera, Greek tragedy, opera, Neapolitan drama (<em>sceneggiata napoletana</em>) and thriller, Ferrante’s characters, places, and situations sustain a type of Italy many readers in Anglophone countries like to envision: loud, theatrical and picturesque. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93707/original/image-20150903-24469-1j5mlxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A gloomy chaotic Naples and its Vesuvius operate as backdrop of crime, family plots of love, betrayal and jealousy (a bit The Sopranos style), and explicit sexual descriptions. All is cunningly knitted in novels that seem to confirm current systems of expectations and values according to the typical <em>romanzo popolare</em> (popular novel) style, as defined by Umberto Eco.</p>
<p>There is, however, something more. The power of Ferrante’s books stands in the simple and intense manner emotions are narrated. The reader feels inundated by the violent passions, obsessions and illusions of the vulnerable protagonists. An exploration of women’s psyche, these stories, in fact, display emotions the reader has experienced (in friendship and family relations), but that she is hardly able to express and acknowledge. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the evasiveness of the author clearly intensifies readers’ fascination with these stories. A woman, a man, a committee of men or, even, just a commercial stunt? Fuss and speculation surround her ghostly figure. Whoever this writer is, it is doubtless that her “absence” makes her works powerful. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93709/original/image-20150903-24496-486to7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elena Ferrante’s The Story of The Lost Child.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Text Publishing</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Feeling the burden of exposing herself she wants her individual books to have a life on their own, independent from the author’s incumbent presence. </p>
<p>Invisibility gives her the opportunity to be more sincere, more profound, and much more risk-bearing. She is against self-promotion as it would weaken any work of art. Her elusiveness, in this way, opens up a creative space for her and her addicted readers who (without any interference and limitations) are placed in the position of being able to extract the author from the text itself. They can, consequently, experience a stronger emotional bond with the protagonists.</p>
<p>In line with <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Roland-Gerard-Barthes">Roland Barthes</a>’s 1968 essay <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author">The Death of the Author</a>, Ferrante’s books leave the reader to bestow the meaning they want to the “multidimensional space” of the text. This is, itself, a complex fabric resulting from other, previously existing, sources (other texts, stories, ideas and memories). </p>
<p>In My Brilliant Friend, Lila tells Elena that there is always a “before”. With regard to the way their neighbourhood, in the outskirts of Naples, had developed: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already here before us, but we had grown up without realising it, without ever even thinking about it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a game of hide and seek, the reader is conferred, therefore, with the power to discover and imagine, that “before”, which is Ferrante herself, but absent.</p>
<p><br>
<em>The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante is published by Text Publishing.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46605/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Giorgia Alù does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>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.Giorgia Alù, Senior Lecturer, Department of Italian Studies , University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.