In denying Elena Ferrante's right to anonymity, Claudio Gatti plays out the belief that women’s lives are public property, says Victoria Smith



Victoria Smith will be joining Shappi Khorsandi, Jess Phillips MP and Fi Glover to discuss the future of women's writing at Blogfest on November 12 - book your ticket now

How much of yourself should you reveal when you are writing? The answer, of course, depends on whether you are male or female.



If you are male, it doesn't really matter. You are the default human being and all experiences about which you write – regardless of whether or not you have actually had them – will be universal.



If you are female it is more complicated. Reveal too much about yourself and you are not a real writer at all, just an over-sharer, wallowing in the petty specifics of a non-male life. Don't reveal enough and you are suspect, manipulative, a tease. Either way you can't win.



Elena Ferrante, author of the Neapolitan Novels, chose to write under a pseudonym because she said it removed her from "all forms of social pressure or obligation" and stopped her from feeling "tied down to what could become one's public image". Unlike female authors who use male pen names, she was still identifiable as a woman – but as a woman who could only be judged by her works, not her background, her appearance or her personal life.



I don't imagine there's a woman alive who can't see the attraction in this. It is rare that women get to occupy public space without the tiniest details of their lives being held up for scrutiny. One sees this, for example, in the current US presidential campaign, in which the affairs of Hillary Clinton's husband are deemed more newsworthy than the actual misdeeds of her male rival. Men are permitted to have private lives because their presence in public life is taken for granted. For a while, Ferrante managed to beat this unfair system, defining herself solely by her written words, denying onlookers the chance to trawl through her biography and use it to devalue her work.

The same male entitlement leads to women being told that if they don't like abuse on social media, they should deactivate; if they don't like being victims of revenge porn, they shouldn't take photos of themselves. It is a way of controlling women by limiting the space they will dare to claim for themselves.



On Sunday the New York Review of Books published an article by the journalist Claudio Gatti, claiming to reveal Ferrante's true identity. According to Gatti, this was perfectly acceptable because "by announcing that she would lie on occasion Ferrante has […] relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown." In other words, she shouldn't have led the reader on. As far as Gatti is concerned, she was asking for it.



When a male author tells half-truths or plays with facts we don't call this 'lying'; we call it 'being postmodern' and consider it very clever indeed. When a woman does the same, cleverness suddenly becomes deviousness. If she was never prepared to give us the whole story, then she should not have told us anything at all. Gatti describes Ferrante as "the very first person to violate Elena Ferrante's privacy." It is an absurd statement to make, rooted in the belief that a woman must be either wholly invisible or public property.



The same male entitlement leads to women being told that if they don't like abuse on social media, they should deactivate; if they don't like being victims of revenge porn, they shouldn't take photos of themselves; if they don't like having their body ridiculed on the cover of Closer, they shouldn't do anything that could remotely lead to them being considered famous. It is a way of controlling women by limiting the space they will dare to claim for themselves. And it happens to all women writers, including mummy bloggers, mocked for their focus on the personal – because that's not real life, just 'mummy stuff' – while simultaneously accused of being dishonest or smug. The problem here is not what women write, it is that they write at all.



"Women," wrote Ferrante in an email interview with the journalist Deborah Orr earlier this year, "still encounter an enormous number of obstacles":



"They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections. To give an outlet to their creativity is thus especially arduous. It requires a great deal of motivation, strict discipline and many compromises. Above all, it entails quite a few feelings of guilt."



A female writer should not have to struggle through all this and then, once she has produced something amazing, have to contend with male journalists telling her what else it is their 'right' to know. Women's stories are complete in themselves, with the boundaries they choose to give them. All else is irrelevant.