Chronicles of a Heartache - four seminars on Elena Ferrante’s standalone novels

Chronicles of a Heartache was a series of four seminars that took place over the summer of 2024. Each session explored one of Ferrante’s standalone novels: Troubling Love (L'amore molesto), The Days of Abandonment (I giorni dell'abbandono), The Lost Daughter (La figlia oscura), and The Lying Life of Adults (La vita bugiarda degli adulti). 

These four works have deeply influenced our own reading lives. Ferrante’s writing unflinchingly chronicles the lives of women, and shows how political intimacy can be. It is her insistence on taking the experiences of friendship, motherhood, desire and disappointment seriously that has drawn readers to Ferrante’s words. While the Neapolitan Quartet is the entry point for most into Ferrante’s world, we wanted to invite conversation around her lesser-known novels, and to explore the development of her voice over the decades. 

Participants to these seminars could read the novels in whichever language they wanted: some in the original Italian, others in the English translations by Ann Goldstein, and a few in other translations, such as Greek and Norwegian. Across the four seminars, we discussed mother-daughter relationships, marriage, friendships, heartbreaks, and social mobility, all in the context of Ferrante’s Naples. We reflected on the relationship of writing to physical space, and women’s experiences in cities, while also thinking about the motif of ‘disappearing women’ in Ferrante’s work. As always, we focused on translation, and particularly the simultaneous presence and absence of the Neapolitan dialect from the works we were reading.