Elena Ferrante: A Case Study in Authorship Attribution

In this chapter several authorship attribution methods are applied to identify the true author behind the Elena Ferrante penname. To achieve this objective, a corpus must be carefully generated as shown in the first section. Next, four authorship models with known high effectiveness levels must be selected and applied to resolve this authorship problem. After explaining how the stylistic features have been chosen and how we applied the PCA, Delta, Labbe, and Zeta models, we reach the same conclusion: D. Starnone is the true writer of the My Brilliant Friend’s saga. To complement this deduction, a more qualitative analysis is performed to obtain a better understanding of the strong stylistic relationship between Elena Ferrante and Domenico Starnone.