ROME — The Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s gripping novels about the rich and complex lives of women — as mothers, daughters, wives, writers — have won her a devoted cult following. After several years of growing critical favor, her readership reached new levels this fall with the release of “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” the third volume in her series of Naples novels, which recount the lifelong friendship of two women.

In her most extensive interview in years, Ms. Ferrante, who publishes under a pseudonym and has never revealed her identity, addressed her choice of anonymity — or “absence,” as she called it. In an interview conducted by email and through her publisher, she disputed the oft-circulated notion that she might be a man. “My identity, my sex, are found in my writing,” Ms. Ferrante wrote in Italian in response to written questions conveyed by her longtime Italian publisher, Sandra Ozzola Ferri, who said the writer had declined to grant an in-person interview.

As to rumors regularly recycled in the Italian press that she is the Italian novelist Domenico Starnone, Ms. Ferrante said she felt guilty. “I have great esteem for him,” she wrote, “and I am certain that he understands my motivations.” (Mr. Starnone, who has said he is tired of answering questions about this “groundless hypothesis,” said in an interview that he hoped Ms. Ferrante’s answer here would “close the issue definitively.”)

Ms. Ferrante also discussed her aims and challenges as a writer, the influence of the classical world and of motherhood on her work, and her views on contemporary Italy — “an extraordinary country that has been made completely ordinary by the permanent confusion between legality and illegality, between the common good and private interest” — and on her native Naples, “the best and worst of Italy and the world.”