What if the Elena Ferrante Secret is heart-warming?

My guess is that pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante is actually a husband-wife team. But the idea of a man and a woman cooperating to do something better than they could alone is out of fashion.

Logarithmic History is a wonderful blog that comments on the history of the universe from the big bang to the recent near-present at a logarithmically slowing rate over the course of the year.

On this logarithmic scale, Earth is formed on January 20, trilobites arise toward the end of February, and dinosaurs meet their doom on April 6. The middle of the year finds Homo erectus giving way to early versions of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. October begins with King David and ends with Columbus. By December 7, we reach the year of the Beatles’ first LP (1963).

From a current post (Sexual Turing Test):

[Elena] Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet seems to display a deep knowledge of daily life in Naples from the 1950s on. The fictional narrator is a woman, and a complicated friendship between two women is the great theme of the tetralogy. So it came as something of a shock when an Italian journalist, Claudio Gatti, provided pretty strong evidence, from financial and real estate records, pointing toward Anita Raja, a professional translator, as a likely candidate for Ferrante. Raja’s biography is nothing like “Ferrante”’s: she is the daughter of a Polish Jewish refugee and an Italian magistrate, and only lived in Naples up to age three. But the story may be even more complicated: Anita Raja is married to the Naples-born writer Domenico Starnone. Italian critics have noted stylistic similarities between Ferrante’s work and Starnone’s, and recently several computer stylometric analyses point to Starnone as far and away the most likely author of “Ferrante’s” work. So some combination of Raja and Starnone seems likely.

I’m fascinated by how almost nobody wants to believe novelist Elena Ferrante is that husband-wife literary couple who got rich and bought a really nice apartment in Rome the exact moment Elena’s royalty checks would have started rolling in.

Or, if they do, they want to believe either it was the wife writing alone or the husband writing alone.

I’m putting the paywall here. There are 887 words below the paywall. Plus, you get to comment if you become a paid subscriber.