Anonymity revealed

Ferrante is the author of the internationally bestselling Neapolitan novels, a series of four books – My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014) and The Story of the Lost Child (2015) – charting the life-long friendship between two women who grew up in Naples. She has chosen to remain anonymous since the publication of her first novel in 1992 and her identity was known only to the team at the small publishing house with whom she’s remained. Now – thanks to Gatti and his piece in the New York Review of Books – we know she is Anita Raja, a Rome-based German translator. Who knows what effect this unmasking will have on the publicity-shy author who said in an (email) interview earlier this year that her anonymity allowed her to “concentrate exclusively with complete freedom on writing and its strategies”. The worst-case scenario is that she may decide not to write another novel – how can that possibly be a good thing?

Given what is going on in the world at the moment, Gatti might have used his investigative skills to seek out a story that actually was in the public’s interest to hear about. There is a history of women writers choosing to remain anonymous or writing under pseudonyms – we need look no further than the Brontë sisters who famously first published their novels under the names of Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell in order to be taken seriously. Even today, it could be argued, women’s writing is often consdidered less worthy or literary, frequently reduced to fit into categories such as ‘chick-lit’ or ‘family saga’. Some of the commentary and speculation around Ferrante – before her identity became known – was that she could in fact be a male author (or even, preposterously, a group of men), and if that were the case, how did he write so well and with such insight about female friendships? Now, of course, that accomplishment is diminished, because female friendships are ‘women’s interest’ and therefore it is ‘easy’ to write well about them.

Hmmm. Sound familiar? When the Brontës were still safely behind their male pseudonyms critics were ‘denouncing’ them as women writers, while simultaneously using the subject matter of their work – sexual passion, alcoholism, domestic abuse – to prove they must be men.

Funny how some things don’t change.