When I heard that Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author of the My Brilliant Friend series of novels, had been “outed” in the New York Review of Books by Italian journalist Claudio Gatti, it stirred memories handed down through my family.
In 1929 a similar thing happened to my great-aunt, when the third volume of her autobiographical fiction trilogy about her childhood in Australia, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, was published. She was a novelist who wrote as a man – Henry Handel Richardson – and whose first novel, Maurice Guest, was described by Carmen Callil, founder of Virago books, as “one of the great novels of the 20th century”.
The books’ strongly feminist approach attracted attention and the press became determined to find out more. It was, Richardson noted, the Daily Telegraph that published a paragraph, “saying my identity as Miss Ettie R [her real name was Ethel] had been discovered and disclosed. Who was the culprit?” She never found out.
My great-aunt adopted a male name, as George Eliot did, to ensure her works would be taken seriously at a time when women writers were still regularly diminished. She was a reclusive, eccentric woman, who insisted her maid should wear heavily padded slippers to avoid noise. A suffragette who was also president of the Psychic Association, she invited Olga Roncoroni, a much younger woman whom she met when Roncoroni was playing the piano in a cinema, to live with her and her husband for the rest of her life.
Being a female writer may not be such a problem these days. More eyebrows may have been raised at the erotic content of Maurice Guest, or at the description of passionate affection for an older girl at boarding school in The Getting of Wisdom, than they would be today.
But Ferrante writes with a deeply intimate, intensely empathetic understanding of her female characters. And, as was the case for my great-aunt, this has aroused huge curiosity about how far her writing is autobiographical, and just who and what she is.
Ferrante says all she wants is to concentrate on her writing, and what could be more reasonable? Surely it is not hard to understand why a novelist would not want journalists’ interpretations to get in between their work and their readers.
My great-aunt went to enormous pains to be known only as Henry Handel Richardson and, extraordinarily, kept a hugely discursive and lengthy correspondence with Paul Solanges, translator into French of Maurice Guest, without him ever finding out that she was a woman. Being “outed” caused her deep upset and she was disturbed by the requests for interviews and photo-shoots that followed.
So I feel much compassion for Elena Ferrante, as I shall continue to call her, and disgust for Gatti, who it seems “uncovered” her identity by tracing payments through her publisher, and has sanctimoniously justified his actions by asserting the right of the readers who made her a superstar, to know her identity.
Gatti has since been described as an “investigative journalist”. Perhaps it dates me as a decayed old hack, but my working life has been lived with humble regard to the enormous value of investigative journalism. Digging out the identity of a fabulous writer who does not want to join the age of exhibitionism at any price is degrading. And if, as has been suggested, it puts her off writing any more, what a price to pay.
