A writer’s relationship with their readers is delicate territory. Readers always want more: we flood to book signings and fill tents at literary festivals in a quest to see if the writer in the flesh matches the voice we hear in our head when we read. Many writers, solitary and private people, want less. In the past 24 hours the extremes of this relationship have collided in time and space. The most famous pseudonymous novelist of our times, Elena Ferrante, who has guarded her anonymity for 24 years to escape the social pressure and obligations of maintaining a public image, has, apparently, been unmasked. An investigative journalist, Claudio Gatti, in a piece published – such is the writer’s global fame – in four languages simultaneously reveals that she is not a Neapolitan born amid poverty and violence but Anita Raja, the daughter of a German-born teacher who lived for only her earliest years in Naples. A few hours later, the prominent Indian radical and public intellectual Arundhati Roy, whose first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize in 1997, tweeted that her second, The Minister for Utmost Happiness, will be out in June 2017. The radical who uses her genius for storytelling as a political weapon, and simultaneously exploits her fame to promote her causes, fills her readers’ heads with her voice. Elena Ferrante, of whom we know nothing except she is not who she says she is, is so blank a space in her readers’ imagination that her characters, whose inner lives are as rich as the times that press upon them, have a substance that is entirely for us to realise. We are the poorer for being forced to know her.