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.
Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco in the television adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend (2018)
Image: IMDb
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.
The social network website Goodreads provides insight into what some women are reading.
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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.
The gender of the writer can cause some readers to change their analysis of a novel.
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The unmasking of Charlotte Brontë changed the way that her books were read.
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.
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In her novels, in numerous articles and in correspondence, Elena Ferrante has chosen to depict the world from a female point of view. She has always claimed that the woman’s gaze is decisive.
Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has been called “one of the great novelists of our time” and her Neapolitan novel cycle “an unconditional masterpiece”. But the author herself remains an intangible figure.