Elena Ferrante’s Novels Are Beloved. Her Identity Remains a Mystery.

Seemingly overnight, Elena Ferrante — or rather, the novelist writing as Elena Ferrante — found worldwide acclaim.

Her novels were everywhere: You couldn’t swing a tote bag without spotting one of her pastel-hued paperbacks on the subway, at the beach, in the airport.

The four novels that make up the Neapolitan quartet rocketed her to fame. Beginning with “My Brilliant Friend” in 2011, the books, which include “The Story of a New Name” (2013), “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” (2014) and “The Story of the Lost Child” (2015), chart the lifelong, charged friendship between two women in postwar Naples, Italy.

Readers appreciated the nuanced relationship between the main characters, Lenù and Lila, a delicate mixture of love, jealousy and abiding loyalty. Critics zeroed in on Ferrante’s intimate attention to women’s lives, both in the Neapolitan novels and in her other books, which many writers of her generation had not considered subjects of literary merit.

But as her star soared, fans devoted to Ferrante and her books confronted a stubborn question: Who is Elena Ferrante, really?

The background

Ferrante has been publishing for over 30 years, and adopted her alias with her 1992 debut, “L’amore molesto”(later released in English as “Troubling Love”). With the appearance of the Neapolitan quartet, “Ferrante fever” began to spread, particularly in the United States, where literature in translation makes up a small fraction of popular fiction.