As Ferrante makes clear here, a woman’s sexual allure will not get her much. Lila never liked sex. (Her wedding night is a violent rape scene.) As for Lena, she does like sex, and, in a touching passage, she says to her old boyfriend Antonio—whose heart she broke for the sake of the no-good Nino she’s running away with at the end of “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”—that it was he who awakened her to it: “He was the discovery of excitement, he was the pit of the stomach that grew warm, that opened up, that turned liquid, releasing a burning indolence.” But, as she goes on to tell him, nothing ever fulfilled that expectation. At the end of the book, Lena is alone, and Lila, no doubt, is, too.

Yet there is no repudiation of the trappings of femininity: the dolls, the bracelets, the buttons and bows. The book fairly teems with women’s things, women’s bodies, which, furthermore, are imagined as being in a state of constant flow, as if they were part of some piece of French écriture féminine. Lena again and again has visions that her mother, whom she mostly hates, has crawled inside her body and is kicking around inside there. Lila has something worse, a condition she calls “dissolving boundaries”: it seems to her that edges of things melt, and their innards squirt and slosh into each other. Do you remember, Lila asks Lena, that night on Ischia, when you all said how beautiful the sky was? To her, it wasn’t beautiful: “I smelled an odor of rotten eggs, eggs with a greenish-yellow yolk inside the white and inside the shell, a hard-boiled egg cracked open. I had in my mouth poisoned egg stars, their light had a white, gummy consistency, it stuck to your teeth, along with the gelatinous black of the sky, I crushed it with disgust, I tasted a crackling of grit. Am I clear? Am I making myself clear?”

As plenty of readers will have heard by now, “Elena Ferrante” is a pen name. Apart from the information in the jacket bio—that she is a woman and was born in Naples—we know nothing about the author. (There is an interview with her by Sandro and Sandra Ferri in the Spring, 2015, issue of The Paris Review, but it gives no further biographical details.) It seems to me unquestionable, though, that these books were written not just by a female but by one who has been pregnant. Lila says that, if she didn’t stay alert, the world would undergo a huge inundation: “The waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.” In fact, at this point in the novel waters might indeed be breaking. Lila and Lena are both heavily pregnant, and they are sitting in a rocking car in the middle of Naples, where they have taken refuge from an earthquake, the Irpinia earthquake of 1980. (The book tracks world events closely. We hear about the Red Brigades, Chernobyl, the World Trade Center.) All around them, gas mains are exploding, buildings are collapsing; a cemetery is breaking off the mainland and falling into the sea.

Here, Ferrante has used a catastrophic real-life event to exemplify—indeed, culminate—her sense of women’s undefended boundaries, but the matter comes up again and again, even in modest circumstances. At one point, Lena’s daughter Dede, now a young woman, who for years has avoided any physical contact with her—she’s another one who fears being invaded—breaks her rule and goes and sits in her mother’s lap. Lena describes the feeling of her daughter’s warm bottom, the “wide hips,” against her thighs. To me, that was almost as unsettling as the earthquake.

Much of the thrill of the four books lies just in this elastic back and forth between realism and hallucination. No one is a more careful realist than Ferrante. When Lena’s husband, in their kitchen, gets ready to punch her in the face, Ferrante takes time to tell us about the hum of the refrigerator and the drip of the faucet in the background. And her general faithfulness to reality encourages us to stay with her as she veers off into hallucination. Some scenes, just by their tone and pacing, and by what they omit as much as by what they include, seem to take place in slow motion or under water or on another planet. It’s not that things are askew. The very air is different. This, Ferrante seems to say, is what happens in the world of women, and though much of the book is devoted to women’s more frequently discussed problems—such as how they are supposed to go out to work and raise the kids at the same time, and, if they do have work, work they care about, how come this still seems to them secondary to their relationship with a man?—it is the exploration of the women’s mental underworld that makes the book so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed, in all literature.

Ferrante’s other subject is language. Insofar as the book is realist, the critical thing in it is the neighborhood: the poverty, the ignorance, the unremitting violence. The only way to gain any power or happiness is to get out, and the only way to do that is via schooling, the learning of words, and not the words your parents speak—that’s dialect—but standard Italian. Apart from femaleness, there is nothing in the book more important than this. From page to page, in passages of dialogue, Ferrante tells us (and then so does the excellent translator, Ann Goldstein, who is also the head of the copy department at The New Yorker) if someone is speaking standard Italian and the other is speaking dialect, so that we can understand what is going on between them, and then, if anyone switches, as they may do, what that means.

Basically, what the linguistic difference means is whether the person is going to remain in the neighborhood and—to put it in female terms, Ferrante’s terms—get pregnant every two years, and get beaten up by her husband if dinner is late, or whether she’s going to escape this. Both Lila and Lena understand the situation early on. When they are twelve and have the chance to go to middle school—where you can perfect your Italian and even learn Latin, and also write essays and read books—both of them are desperate to go. But first you must pass an exam, and taking the exam costs money, and Lila’s family is marginally poorer than Lena’s. Also, Lila’s father fails to see why a girl needs an education, as Lena’s father, for some reason, does not. So Lila is told that she can’t continue her schooling. This is the fork in the road for the two girls, and it is marked by the book’s first serious moral crime. Lila, with all her powers of seduction, suggests to Lena that they play hooky one morning and walk across the city to the harbor, to the sea, which they have never seen. Lena agrees, as she always does to Lila’s mad plans. But on the appointed morning, when they set out, Lila begins acting strange. She slows down; she keeps looking behind her, as if she’s afraid they’re being followed. Her hand starts to sweat. Suddenly, a storm breaks, and Lila insists that they go back. This baffles Lena—Lila is never afraid of anything—but they run back home, and Lena gets a beating. The next day, Lila inspects Lena’s bruises: