Speculation and several theories as to her true identity, based on information Ferrante has given in interviews as well as analysis drawn from the content of her novels, have been put forth and routinely denied.
[5] It narrates the movements of the title character on the day of her mother's burial, particularly her return to her safe retreat in the old elevator in the apartment building where she grew up.
The novel follows protagonist Delia when she returns home following the mysterious death of her mother, a poor seamstress, who had been found drowned on an Italian beach, wearing nothing but a luxury bra.
They tell the life story of two perceptive and intelligent girls, Lila and Lenu, born in Naples in 1944, who try to create lives for themselves within a violent and stultifying culture.
"[18] Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic, praised particularly how the books circle back to its start, to Lila and Lenu's childhood games, in the final installment.
[20] Her first novel after finishing the quartet, The Lying Life of Adults, was translated into English by Ann Goldstein and played with the stereotypical teenage-girl-coming-of-age structure.
[24] Speculation as to her true identity has been rife, and several theories, based on information Ferrante has given in interviews as well as analysis drawn from the content of her novels, have been put forth.
"[24][28] In 2003, Ferrante published Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey, a volume of letters, essays, reflections and interviews, which sheds some light on her background.
It was the first scholarly monograph on Elena Ferrante, a detailed self-study of her poetics drawing on Western literary and philosophical texts while also constructing its own theoretical framework.
'"[4] In March 2016, Marco Santagata, an Italian novelist and philologist, a scholar of Petrarch and Dante, and a professor at the University of Pisa,[29] published a paper detailing his theory of Ferrante's identity.
Santagata's paper drew on philological analysis of Ferrante's writing, close study of the details about the cityscape of Pisa described in the novel, and the fact that the author reveals an expert knowledge of modern Italian politics.
[1] In October 2016, investigative reporter Claudio Gatti published an article jointly in Il Sole 24 Ore, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the New York Review of Books that relied on financial records related to real estate transactions and royalties payments to draw the conclusion that Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator, is the real author behind the Ferrante pseudonym.
"[33] Others have compared the unwanted publishing of her personal information to doxxing,[34] and to a violation of privacy,[35] something heightened by the violent language used by Gatti, who said she wanted it to happen.
[38] In December 2016, Tommaso Debenedetti, a controversial Italian prankster,[39] published on the website of the Spanish daily El Mundo a purported interview with Raja confirming she was Elena Ferrante.
[41] In September 2017, a team of scholars, computer scientists, philologists and linguists at the University of Padua analyzed 150 novels written in Italian by 40 different authors, including seven books by Ferrante but none by Raja.
Ferrante has repeatedly dismissed suggestions that she is actually a man, telling Vanity Fair in 2015 that questions about her gender are rooted in a presumed "weakness" of female writers.
The Lost Daughter, the 2021 directorial debut film of Maggie Gyllenhaal, starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley, is based on the novel of the same name.
In 2016, it was reported that a 32-part television series inspired by the Neapolitan Novels was in the works, co-produced by the Italian producer Wildside for Fandango Productions, with screenwriting led by the writer Francesco Piccolo.