It Takes Many Hands to Draw Elena Ferrante’s Profile

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 attract 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 scientific publications, however. Starting from a corpus of 150 novels by 40 different authors selected specifically 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 affinity 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 attribution, and profiling, who worked independently on the same data and added their own contribution to this case study.