The Brilliant Friend(s) of Elena Ferrante
Résumé
Elena Ferrante is the pen name of a writer highly successful on the international stage,
whose real identity has been kept secret by her publishers, E/O, for more than 25 years.
For some time now, her fame and mystery have combined to atract the attention of
readers, fans, critics, journalists, and academics all over the world, and various hypotheses have already been advanced as to who the hand behind this nom de plume might
be. Elena Ferrante’s work in general, and the question of her anonymity in particular,
have been the object of only a limited number of scientifc publications, however. Starting from a corpus of 150 novels by 40 different authors selected specifcally for this
research project, and from the results of previous qualitative and quantitative studies,
this contribution contextualizes Elena Ferrante’s work on the panorama of contemporary Italian literature. It also provides further elements to support the hypothesis that,
based on what we know now, Domenico Starnone is the writer with the greatest afnity in style and content with the novels signed by Elena Ferrante. The present article
also explains why our Italian research group shared our data and preliminary results
with international experts on textual data analysis, authorship atribution, and profling, who worked independently on the same data and added their own contribution to
this case study.