Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels capture how Lenù’s existence, rather than challenging mythologies of meritocracy as it should, mistakenly reaffirms that meritocracy functions well and that education might be a great equalizer, despite literary and historical realities that suggest otherwise.

Elena Ferrante's new volume, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing (2022), is the culmination of decades of narrative enterprise. It is comprised of four essays dedicated to Ferrante’s formation as a reader and a writer.

When the televised adaptation of Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend makes Turin the home of Elena Greco’s future husband’s family, it undoes the emancipatory energy the city generates in Ferrante’s novels.

Ferrante leaves the reader with a reflection on failure. With this novel, the author attempts to scour the failure of progressive culture’s great projects of emancipation and education, as well as the failure to rework an ending and a trauma: those of a dualistic geopolitical system.