Elena Ferrante has written her story twice: once in a group of intense, highly modeled short novels whose action unfolds over a brief time span; and again in the four sprawling, rambunctious, decades-spanning works that compose her Neapolitan saga. That these two modes of storytelling — the compact and the commodious; the modern and the historical; the distilling of life into metaphor and its picaresque, riotous expansion — are so obviously the obverse of each other constitutes yet another narrative, the story of how an individual (more specifically, a woman) arrives, after the ­vicissitudes of living, at a definition of self. “Do you want the long answer or the short?” is the customary divide between explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. Ferrante gives us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.

Ferrante is the by now famously anonymous Italian ­novelist whose works started appearing in 1992, though their setting is the Naples of the 1950s onward. By the time we reach “The Story of the Lost Child,” the fourth and final installment of the Neapolitan series, we have arrived at the 21st century and Elena, its narrator, is growing old. One can call Ferrante’s novels “her story” for the reason that they are openly autobiographical in form: Against the telling and retelling of the life of a single Neapolitan mother of two — frequently called Elena — who rises from impoverished beginnings to become a successful author, publisher and academic, her anonymity is a sort of beau geste as well as a precaution. These facts are as consistent in the short novels as in the long, but in the Neapolitan saga Ferrante’s writ runs much wider, into detailed accounts of state corruption, murder and political scandals whose participants are presumably recognizable to the modern Italian reader.

Ferrante’s preoccupations — set out with great clarity in her short books “The Days of Abandonment” and “The Lost Daughter,” and discernible in a different way amid the clamor of the Neapolitan novels — are with the inherent radicalism of modern female identity; the struggles of the female artist or intellectual with her biological and social destiny as a woman; and, perhaps most strikingly, with motherhood as it is lived by that woman in all her striving, transitional, divided newness. “The Days of Abandonment,” Ferrante’s finest short work, describes the awakening of its narrator into a Medea-like emotional frenzy when her husband coolly leaves her for a young and beautiful woman. Left alone in their apartment with the care of their two young children, she undergoes a complete dismantling of her traditional, passive female identity and reassembles herself as a raging, active and ultimately autonomous being. What is sacrificed is her relationship with her children; or so, at least, she fears. In this novel as well as others, the narrator views that sacrifice ambivalently, sometimes experiencing it as loss and sometimes glimpsing in it ­possibilities for a new, more complex maternal identity. The power and prestige of the conventional ­mother is ­something from which ­Ferrante’s narrators — as daughters — have struggled to free themselves: What Ferrante describes so ­brilliantly is the double loss that entails for the modern woman, who finds herself neither mothered nor able to mother in turn.