'Stop the siege of Elena Ferrante,' says publisher amid unmasking row

Follow the money is a journalistic aphorism usually reserved for crooked politicians, thieving chief executives and members of the mafia.

So when the pseudonymous best-selling Italian writer known as Elena Ferrante was allegedly exposed this weekend by an Italian reporter using financial and property records to track her down and identify her, the response among some in Italy’s literary and media elite was one of incredulity, and even anger.

Besides, some noted, it wasn’t really a secret anyway, since the name Anita Raja has been floating around for years.

“Stop the siege of Elena Ferrante. She is not a criminal,” her publisher, Sandro Ferri, told La Repubblica, saying she was being treated like a member of the Camorra, the ruthless Neapolitan mafia. From Erri De Luca to Loredana Lipperini (who writes under a pseudonym), the consensus among top Italian writers was that the alleged outing of Ferrante was a dark day for journalism and that her work ought to speak for itself. One Roman paper questioned whether Gatti had pursued Ferrante with a “fury that was worthy of a better cause”.

Readers have also questioned whether Ferrante’s alleged unmasking – from the pursuit of the story to the publication of the news by the New York Review of Books, among others – was linked to sexism: a determination to undermine the desire of a feminist writer to be left out of the public eye.

But even as Gatti’s journalistic tactics and motivation have faced scrutiny, some are also curious about the news that he allegedly revealed, and the way details about Raja’s life may contrast with the image Ferrante’s readers had built in their minds about one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

The allegation that the woman behind the critically acclaimed My Brilliant Friend and the rest of the Neapolitan series is a Rome-based translator and Germanophile has shattered some illusions about the writer’s biography, including details she herself put forward in a book called La Frantumaglia. As Gatti said, Ferrante’s suggestion that she was the daughter of a seamstress who spoke in Neapolitan dialect, and grew up in a home with few books, seems very distinct from the alleged reality. He has seized on the potential discrepancies as a justification for his investigation.

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“I would like to stress that Elena Ferrante (with the help of her publishers) was the very first person to violate Elena Ferrante’s privacy. She did it by providing information about herself in many interviews and in La Frantumaglia. Except she provided information that was false. The Neapolitan seamstress mother, the three sisters, her life in Naples. They were all lies,” he wrote.

But fans have insisted this is a perverse misunderstanding of both Ferrante and literary technique. Katherine Angel, an academic, told BBC Radio 4: “She’s a woman writer who has written very eloquently in many interviews about the reasons for this anonymity, which is that she did not want to have her work biographically reduced and didn’t want to have to be involved in the sort of circus of the personality, the celebrity author.” Ferrante has openly said she would be willing to bend the truth if asked to talk about her life.

Raja, Gatti reported, is the daugher of a German-born Jewish woman named Golda Frieda Petzenbaum who escaped the Holocaust to Milan with her family, before fleeing to Switzerland. Petzenbaum was a refugee for two years before she was reunited with her family in Naples, where they eventually settled.

Raja’s father was a Neapolitan magistrate, and they moved to Rome when she was three. Such is the nature of Ferrante’s writing that many fans have assumed her novels must have been born out of a tough Neapolitan childhood, where, like her protagonist Elena, she would have suffered under the claustrophobia of living in an impoverished neighbourhood and witnessed the savagery of the Camorra before escaping and finding success as a writer.

Instead, the woman who is alleged to be the real Ferrante grew up in Rome, probably not under the same financial stresses that Ferrante has described. Raja is graduated with a degree in literature and has worked as the director of the European library of the Goethe-Institut.

In Italy, the alleged scoop was given a tepid response by most big Italian newspapers, which ran the news in modest stories buried deep in the paper. But in one full-page spread that led the culture section of Il Messaggero, a reporter suggested that the news had created a new desire to understand Ferrante’s demand for anonymity.

Was it really, as Ferrante has steadfastly said, rooted in a decision to reject the culture of self-promotion, shield her privacy and give her the freedom to let her work speak for itself? Or was it “an astute marketing strategy” that worked in her – and her publishers’ – favour?

“In the second case, the game worked very well,” the article concluded.

In fact, there is scant evidence to suggest Ferrante’s desire for anonymity was anything but genuine. Attempts over the years by the Guardian to inquire about Ferrante’s true identity, including for an article about her nomination for the Strega literary prize, were usually met with a roll of the eyes from her publishers, who have always said the issue was irrelevant.