Look, we all love a good mystery. Who doesn’t enjoy playing amateur investigator, employing their impressive array of social-media skills to stalk that girl who keeps showing up on your ex’s Instagram? But when it comes to role-playing Veronica Mars, can you people please leave Elena Ferrante alone?
Italian novelist and professor Marco Santagata is the latest person to put Ferrante on blast, claiming in an article in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the pseudonymous author is in fact the Neapolitan history professor Marcella Marmo. Both Ferrante’s publishing house and Marmo have denied the rumor.
Ferrante herself has said on multiple occasions that she will straight-up stop writing if she’s outed, which begs the question: Can you not? Elena is a precious jewel in a sea of literary sewage. She is the salve for the predictable monotony of internet outrage, a brief reprieve from cynical feminism-as-marketing-strategies. Please, for the love of all things holy (shirtless Michael B. Jordan), leave our girl Elena alone.
