It looks as if the quest to identify the real Elena Ferrante will have to continue, following this week’s firm denial by the historian Marcella Marmo – “Really, I’m not Elena Ferrante” – who had been fingered as the pseudonymous Neapolitan novelist in an Italian newspaper. (It should be noted, though, that there is a precedent for a false denial: Joe Klein initially insisted he was not Anonymous, the author of Primary Colors). So far, Ferrante has eluded the identity detectives for 24 years, already a good score compared with other female authors who have used pseudonyms of either gender.
In Jane Austen’s case, the mystery lasted just six years, from Sense and Sensibility (by “A Lady”) in 1811 to her brother’s revelation after her death in 1817 that she had written the other novels credited to that book’s previously unnamed author. In 1848, the Brontës went to London to out themselves as the women behind Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, a year after the annus mirabilis when their debuts were all published. Two years after George Eliot’s first book, Scenes of Clerical Life, and under pressure because a male impostor was claiming authorship, Mary Ann Evans told her publisher she was the author, and of her first novel, Adam Bede – and was disconcerted to learn he had already guessed.
George Sand (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant) used her nom de plume as her everyday name, as did Françoise Sagan (Françoise Quoirez); Marguerite Yourcenar was what Marguerite de Crayencour gave as her legal name when becoming a naturalised American. Isak Dinesen swiftly acknowledged she was Karen Blixen by using her real name for the Danish translation of Seven Gothic Tales. That Barbara Vine was Ruth Rendell was openly acknowledged on her book’s covers.
Recent unmaskings, voluntary or involuntary, have usually been swift: in no time it became known that EL James was Erika Mitchell, AKA Leonard; three months elapsed between JK Rowling’s debut as Robert Galbraith and a newspaper story revealed his true identity (a first-time writer, bluffed the blurb biog, he “left the military in 2003 and has been working since then in the civilian security industry”). With autobiographers, it takes a bit more time: it was six years before Brooke Magnanti owned up to the blog and books written by Belle de Jour because she was about to be outed; three years before Melissa Broder said she was the Twitter poet @ SoSadToday.
All of this puts Ferrante in a special category of those who have held out for longer, such as the semi-reclusive crime writer Josephine Tey, who was only linked to her birth name (Elizabeth Mackintosh) posthumously. Friends who attended her funeral in 1952 thought they were mourning Gordon Daviot, another of her pseudonyms, and that was who the Times recorded as having been buried.
It’s possible that the Italian could match the feat of Anne Desclos, AKA Dominique Aury, who kept her secret for 40 years before divulging in her mid-80s that she was also Pauline Réage, author of the 1954 erotic classic The Story of O. Surely out of reach, though, is the record pulled off by AM Barnard, a writer of 1860s gothic shockers who was identified by scholars in the 1940s (studying Barnard’s letters to editors) as Louisa Alcott just before she wrote Little Women.
