Seemingly overnight, Elena Ferrante — or rather, the novelist writing as Elena Ferrante — found worldwide acclaim. Her novels were everywhere: You couldn’t swing a tote bag without spotting one of her pastel-hued paperbacks on the subway, at the beach, in the airport. The four novels that make up the Neapolitan quartet rocketed her to fame. Readers appreciated the nuanced relationship between the main characters, Lenù and Lila, a delicate mixture of love, jealousy and abiding loyalty. Critics zeroed in on Ferrante’s intimate attention to women’s lives, both in the Neapolitan novels and in her other books, which many writers of her generation had not considered subjects of literary merit.

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Persons: Elena Ferrante —, “, Readers, Lila, Critics Locations: Naples, Italy