My Brilliant Friend, and Ambition Between Two Women Who Cannot Both Have It

Two girls grow up in the same neighbourhood on the edge of Naples in the nineteen-fifties. The same tenements, the same courtyard, the same dialect, the same teachers, the same men shouting in the same stairwells. At the end of primary school one of them is sent on to middle school and the other is not. Nothing about their abilities explains which one it was. If anything, the evidence in the book points the wrong way: the one who is kept back is the more original mind, and everyone who has taught them knows it.

That is the engine of the four novels published in Italian between 2011 and 2014 under the name Elena Ferrante. They are described, by publishers and reviewers and readers and by this sentence in almost every article written about them, as a great novel of female friendship. The phrase is not false. It is doing the work of a euphemism.

What the books describe is ambition between two women who cannot both have it. Education, escape, a life that belongs to the person living it: in the neighbourhood these things arrive in quantities of roughly one, and the two people best equipped to use them happen to have grown up sharing a staircase. Everything the novels are famous for — the closeness, the cruelty, the decades of letters and silences, the way each woman keeps measuring herself against the other long after they live in different cities — follows from that arithmetic rather than from anything in either character.

The argument here is that Elena’s love for Raffaella and Raffaella’s for Elena is entirely real, that the competition between them is also entirely real, and that the book’s central achievement is its refusal to file the two things separately. And the finding at the end of it, which is the reason this Library is writing about a novel at all: envy between women who love each other is not primarily a moral failing to be confessed and corrected. It is the predictable output of an arrangement in which one seat is offered to two people. The correct target of the feeling is the scarcity. The feeling lands on the friend anyway, because the friend is the one in the room, and pretending it does not is how a friendship gets falsified.

The first volume is L’amica geniale, published by Edizioni e/o in Rome in 2011. The English translation, by Ann Goldstein, was published as My Brilliant Friend by Europa Editions in 2012. Three volumes followed: Storia del nuovo cognome in 2012, in English as The Story of a New Name in 2013; Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta in 2013, as Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay in 2014; and Storia della bambina perduta in 2014, as The Story of the Lost Child in 2015. All four were translated by Goldstein. Ferrante has said in interview that the four are one long story, and that the division into volumes was a practical decision rather than an artistic one, which matters for how the sequence should be read.

The Japanese edition is published by Hayakawa Shobo under the series title Napori no monogatari, translated by Iida Ryosuke, with the four volumes appearing between 2017 and 2019. The first is Rira to watashi, published in 2017.

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. The author has published under it since 1992, has never appeared in public as the author, and has given her reasons more than once: that a book, once written, has no need of its author, and that the absence is a working condition rather than a marketing device. In 2016 a journalist published a claimed identification based on financial records. The publishing house denied it. The investigation drew substantial public criticism, including from other writers, on the grounds that it treated a woman’s decision about her own name as a puzzle owed to the public. This Library refers to the author as Ferrante, does not repeat the claimed identification, and does not assess it. That is not squeamishness. A publication that spends its pages arguing that women should be able to set the terms on which they are known would be incoherent if it made an exception for this one.

There is a television adaptation, co-produced by HBO and Rai and made in Neapolitan and Italian. Four seasons were broadcast between 2018 and 2024, one per volume; the first premiered on HBO on 18 November 2018 and on Rai 1 on 27 November 2018, and the fourth aired in 2024. It is noted here because a reader may encounter the story that way first. It is not read in this essay, and nothing said below should be taken as a judgement of it.

One more fact, because it explains why an essay about a 2011 Italian novel is not an antiquarian exercise. In July 2024 the New York Times Book Review published a list of the hundred best books of the twenty-first century, compiled from a survey of writers, critics and other figures in publishing, and My Brilliant Friend was placed first. Press coverage at the time reported sales of more than ten million copies across some forty countries, a figure that originates with the publisher rather than with an audit. Whatever one makes of lists, the book is not a minority taste. A very large number of people have read this particular account of two girls and one school place and recognised something.

The mechanism is laid out with unusual precision in the first volume, and it is worth being concrete about it, because the whole argument depends on the selection not being about merit.

Both girls are conspicuous in primary school. Their teacher notices them and pushes for both to continue. Continuing costs money — fees, books, private lessons to prepare for the entrance examination — and in that neighbourhood, in that decade, the decision belongs to the parents. Elena’s family is persuaded, grudgingly and after argument. Raffaella’s father refuses. When she presses the point, the novel has him throw her from a window, and her arm breaks. She does not go to middle school. She goes to work in the family shoemaking shop, where she reads on her own, teaches herself, and designs a pair of shoes that will matter later.

Read that sequence again with the economics in view. Two children with the same teachers and the same results. One household finds the money and one does not. The variable that decides which girl gets a life outside the neighbourhood is not intelligence, appetite, discipline or luck in any romantic sense. It is a household budget and a father’s temper. The novel is careful to let the reader see that the girl who is stopped is the one with the more startling mind, so that no reader can comfort herself with the thought that the system, however rough, roughly worked.

This is why the book is a better instrument for thinking about scarcity than almost anything written directly about it. It removes every confounding variable. Same street, same schooling, same language, same year of birth, same sex, same class. One output. Whatever happens between these two women afterwards cannot be attributed to their being different kinds of people, because for the first eleven years of the book they are not.

The word friendship, in ordinary use, describes a relation whose stakes are internal to it. Two people like each other; what they get from the relation is the relation. That is not the shape of this one.

Here, each woman is the other’s measure. The narrator repeatedly finds that her own achievements do not register as real until they have been touched by the other; Joanna Biggs, reviewing the sequence in the London Review of Books in September 2015, picks out exactly this and describes the bond as operating at once like a love affair, like sisterhood, and like two people conducting a single life. A relation of that kind cannot be described in the register of companionship. It has a scoreboard in it, and the scoreboard is not a flaw the friendship acquired. It was installed by the circumstances at the start.

The author has been explicit about this. In remarks collected and discussed in Elena Ferrante’s Key Words, published by Europa Editions in 2019 in Will Schutt’s translation, Ferrante describes competition between women as tolerable only when it does not take over — when it exists alongside affinity, affection and a real sense of being indispensable to one another, and specifically when it does so in spite of envy, jealousy and the rest of what she calls the inevitable company of bad feelings. Notice the grammar. Not instead of. In spite of. The bad feelings are assumed to be present in the good version.

Scholarship on the quartet has landed in the same place. In a December 2024 article published by the University of California, Berkeley, the classicist and comparatist Mario Telò, discussing the novels, describes friendship as always layered with what he calls ugly feelings — competition, envy, jealousy, forms of implicit hostility. That is not a diagnosis of Ferrante’s characters. It is a claim about what the category contains and what most writing about it leaves out.

So: a novel about female friendship is accurate in the way that a novel about a whale is accurate. It names the visible object and misses the pressure the object is under. The pressure here is that there was one seat.

The phrase that gives the book its name is spoken inside the book, and it is worth knowing who says it, because it is the moment the whole structure becomes visible in a single exchange.

It is not the narrator describing her friend. Before her wedding, the girl who was stopped tells the girl who was sent on that she must keep studying, that she must not give it up, and calls her her brilliant friend. The praise runs in the direction nobody expects: from the one who was denied the seat to the one who got it.

Consider what that does. It places the highest available compliment in the mouth of the person with the most reason to withhold it. It is unmistakably love; nobody in this book says a generous thing more rarely or more precisely. And at the same time it is an assignment. If you are the brilliant one, then you must go and be brilliant, and you must do it on behalf of both of us, and every subsequent achievement of yours will carry my name on it somewhere. The narrator spends four volumes unable to decide whether she was blessed or conscripted.

Both readings are available and the book does not adjudicate between them, which is the point. A novel that had decided would have to make the friend either a saint or a parasite, and the reason this one is durable is that it declines the choice. The praise is a gift and a transfer of burden in the same sentence, and neither cancels the other, and that is what it is actually like when two people who love each other are standing on opposite sides of a scarcity.

Now the part this essay exists for.

Envy presents itself to the person having it as a fact about her character. It arrives privately, it feels like rot, and the conclusion it invites is that you are a bad friend who has not managed to be glad. Because it arrives that way, the two standard responses are both about the self: confess it and be forgiven, or suppress it and perform gladness convincingly enough that nobody, including you, has to look at it.

But look at where it comes from rather than at how it feels. If one seat is offered to two people who both qualify, the feeling is not an anomaly and not a personal defect. It is what the arrangement manufactures. You could run it on any two people. The novels are a controlled experiment demonstrating exactly this: take two children who are alike in every measurable way, offer the thing to one of them, and watch what forms between them. What forms is not a symptom of a flaw in either girl. It is the shape of the offer.

It follows that the correct target of the feeling is the scarcity. Not the friend. The friend did not decide there would be one place; somebody else did, and that somebody is not in the room and never will be. This is worth saying plainly because almost nothing in a person’s ordinary emotional vocabulary points that way. There is no available sentence in which you are furious at an allocation. There is a very available sentence in which you are furious at a woman you love.

And here is the part that cannot be smoothed over, and that this Library will not smooth over. Knowing the correct target does not move the feeling. It still lands on the friend. She is the one present, she is the one holding the thing, and her happiness is the daily form the scarcity takes in your life. Any account of this that ends with understand the structure and the feeling will dissolve is lying, and the lying is not harmless: it hands the reader one more thing to have failed at.

Two consolations in particular should be refused. The first is the reframe: it was never envy, it was admiration all along. Sometimes that is true. Often it is a way of keeping a friendship on the condition that it is never described accurately, and a relation that can only be spoken about in the register of admiration has been edited down to something smaller than it was. The second is the verdict: if I envied her, the friendship was never real. That does not follow either, and the novels are four volumes of evidence against it. The two women betray each other, withhold, compete, wound with precision, and remain, for sixty years, the most important fact in each other’s lives. The book never once offers the narrator a scene in which she confesses the envy and is absolved. There is no absolution scene because there is nothing to absolve, and because the arrangement that produced the feeling is still running.

The practical shape of this, stated without advice: a friendship in which the competition cannot be named is not a friendship that has escaped competition. It is one in which the competition is running unattributed, which is the condition under which it does the most damage — because everything it causes then has to be explained some other way, usually as something wrong with one of the two women.

A structural argument of the kind just made has a characteristic failure, and it should be named here rather than left for the counter-reading to find.

The poverty and the violence in these books are not a backdrop against which a psychological drama is staged. They are the mechanism. The neighbourhood contains a family, the Solaras, whose money and menace organise everything else; a marriage market in which a girl of sixteen is an asset; and a routine, unremarked brutality inside households that the novel records without arranging it into a lesson. The girl who was stopped at eleven marries at sixteen, in part to escape the attentions of one man by accepting another. At the wedding, the shoes she designed appear on the feet of the man she was escaping, which tells her, in the space of a second and in front of everybody, what her husband has been doing and what her escape was worth.

That is not an allegory about scarcity. It is an account of who administers it. The scarcity in these books did not descend from the sky as a natural quantity of school places. It was arranged, it was enforced by specific people with specific interests, and somebody profited from every stage of it. The Berkeley scholar Rhiannon Welch, in the same 2024 article, points to an episode in the second volume that exposes an education system built to reproduce the class it sorts, and calls that a theme running through the novels. The seat was scarce because it was designed to be.

Two corrections to the argument follow. First, structural language is at permanent risk of making brutality sound like an allocation problem. A man throwing his daughter out of a window is not a data point about household budgets, and any sentence in this essay that made it sound like one would be a bad sentence. Second, the routes out are not equivalent and should not be added together. Schooling is slow, legitimate and cumulative. Marriage, in this setting, is fast, and it is as much a route in as a route out: it converts a girl into somebody’s new surname, which is exactly what the second volume is titled after. Any account that treats these as two comparable options has already lost the book.

This Library has been here before, from three different directions, and the honest thing is to say what those readings established and where this one departs from them.

It has read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a condition for intimacy rather than only for creativity, and the finding there was materialist: Woolf does not prescribe courage or permission, she names a sum of money and a door that locks, and the transfer to closeness is that a woman who cannot leave cannot meaningfully consent to staying. It has read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening for the unease provoked by a woman who wants a life of her own and cannot say what it is for, the finding being that a want with no category attached to it produces more social disturbance than a want that is merely forbidden. And it has read Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love for the loves that keep a life from narrowing, including the demotion nobody performed — the closest friendship that ends without an event, because the default ranking of loves simply executed itself.

All three are about one woman and her conditions. The question in each is whether she has what she needs: the money, the door, the vocabulary, the plural attachments. The question can be asked, and answered, about a single person in a single life.

Ferrante adds the second woman, and that changes the question from provision to distribution. It is no longer whether the conditions exist. It is who got them, out of two people who had an equal claim, and what the other one is supposed to do with what she then feels. Woolf’s five hundred a year is a claim about a floor. Ferrante’s single school place is a claim about a queue. A floor can in principle be raised for everybody. A queue cannot; a queue is defined by the fact that somebody is behind somebody else. That is the distinct thing these novels have that the earlier readings did not reach, and it is why the emotional material here is envy rather than longing.

Before anything in this section is read as a statement about a people, a fence. Nothing below describes a national character, and nothing below describes any reader. What follows is an account of arrangements — how many openings of a given kind exist, where they are, and who reports moving in order to reach them. Arrangements are made by decisions and can be unmade by decisions, which is the entire reason for distinguishing them from character.

Japan’s Cabinet Office ran a survey in fiscal 2024 on women’s participation and gender equality in local areas, with ten thousand respondents aged eighteen to thirty-nine; its findings are reported in the 2025 White Paper on Gender Equality. Among people who had grown up outside the Tokyo area and were living in it at the time of the survey, the most common reason given for having left home was that there were too few places to study that they wanted to go to — reported by 42.1 per cent of women and 29.7 per cent of men — followed by too few jobs of the kind they wanted, and then by simply wanting to be away from where they were from. Among women who had moved to a city for their own reasons, 35.0 per cent gave the first of those answers.

At the other end of the same pipeline, the same white paper reports the share of women among employees holding rank at enterprises with a hundred or more regular workers in 2024: 24.4 per cent at kakarichō level, 15.9 per cent at kachō level, 9.8 per cent at buchō level. Those are not statements about ambition. They are a description of a funnel, measured at three points, narrowing as it goes.

Put the two together and the shape is the one the novels describe rather than a different shape that happens to rhyme. A route out exists. It is real, it is countable, and there are not many of them. Reaching it typically requires leaving the place you are from, which is a cost the people who stay do not have to pay and the people who go do not get refunded. And a cohort of women who grew up together, in the same schools, with the same results, can find themselves aimed at the same small number of openings — which means that the ordinary, unremarkable experience of watching a friend get one is available to a very large number of people who have never thought of it in those terms.

Add to that an etiquette, and this is the part that most closely matches the book. In a great many settings the visible wanting is itself penalised. A woman understood to be competing is read as unpleasant in a way that a man in the same posture is not, which means the wanting has to be carried without being shown, and the feeling that arrives when somebody else gets the thing has to be carried without being named. That is precisely the narrator’s problem across four volumes. She is never once permitted the sentence I want this, she wants it too, and there is one. So she has to render the feeling as something else: as admiration, as insecurity, as a defect in herself, as a comment on her friend’s character. Every one of those translations costs her accuracy about a person she loves.

None of which says anything about any particular reader’s friendships, and this Library has no way of knowing and does not claim to.

Before the counter-reading, the interest, stated against ourselves.

This house sells private companionship: an evening with a person, booked in advance, priced, bounded, and stated in terms before it begins. Which means that among the things it sells is an arrangement in which nobody is chosen over anybody else. There is no competition in it, by construction. An essay arguing that competition between women is structurally imposed, corrosive and largely unspeakable is therefore an essay that flatters the product, and a reader is entitled to weigh what follows with that in view rather than discovering it in a footnote.

So here are the constraints, stated as things we may not claim rather than as reassurance. An evening here does not repair a friendship and we do not say it does. It does not address envy, resolve it, or give anybody a place to put it. It is not a substitute for the scarce thing and it cannot be made into one.

That last point is the important one and it runs directly against our interest. The scarce goods in this essay are a school place, a track at work, the money and mobility to leave. None of them is for sale here. Whatever an evening of private companionship is, it does not enlarge anybody’s options, and a house that implied otherwise would be selling hope on a false description. We are also not in any relationship with the author, the translator, the publishers, the broadcasters or the scholars named above, none of whom knows this publication exists.

Four objections, and they are good ones.

The first is that reading sixteen hundred pages as an argument about scarcity flattens them. The quartet is also about writing and who is permitted to do it, about dialect and what it costs to leave one, about motherhood, the body, Italian politics across four decades, the earthquake, the city itself. A thesis is a way of not reading most of a book. This essay concedes the point without qualification: it runs one line through the sequence, it does not pretend to be a reading of the whole, and a person who has read the four volumes will be able to name a dozen things it has ignored. It is offered as one instrument, not as an account.

The second is that the violence and the poverty are doing more work than the essay allows, and that the language of structures is exactly the language that lets a reader avoid them. Scarcity is a clean, almost administrative word. What happens in the neighbourhood is not clean. There is a real risk that an essay like this one converts a book about brutality into a book about resource allocation, and thereby makes it comfortable. The previous section tried to hold that line; the objection is that trying is not the same as succeeding, and it may not have succeeded.

The third is the sharpest and this essay’s answer to it is only partial. Raffaella may not be a person in these books. She never narrates. Everything the reader knows about her arrives through Elena, who is telling the story, who is the one who got the school place, and who has an obvious interest in how the account comes out. Critics have long noticed that the friend functions as a principle — brilliance, dissolution, negation, the thing that cannot be contained — at least as much as a character. If that is right, the quartet cannot be evidence about two women, because there is only one woman and one weather system, and an argument built on the pair is built on a narrator’s construction. The most that can be said in reply is that the asymmetry is itself part of the finding: the one who got the seat also got the pen, and the one who did not gets to exist only inside somebody else’s sentences. That reply is true and it is also extremely convenient for the argument, which is a reason to hold it loosely.

The fourth objection is about the reader rather than the book, and it is the one this essay takes most seriously. A reading that explains envy structurally may give somebody permission to stop examining it. Some envy is simply envy. Some friendships genuinely are damaged, over years, by a person who cannot bear another person’s luck, and structural language makes a superb alibi: it converts a private meanness into a comment on capitalism and closes the file. This essay cannot tell those cases apart from the outside, has no means of doing so, and should not be used to settle any particular case in anybody’s life. What it argues is narrower than it may feel while being read: that the feeling is produced by the arrangement before it is produced by the person, which is a claim about origin and not a distribution of blame, and not an exemption from the ordinary duty of looking at what one is doing to a friend.

A fifth, briefly: importing the mechanism of a mid-century Neapolitan novel into contemporary Japan risks doing damage to both, and a reader who thinks the comparison is too neat is not obviously wrong. The defence is that the section imports a structure and not an atmosphere, and rests on what respondents to an official survey said about their own reasons. It is still a comparison, and comparisons flatter whoever is making them.

This is not a full reading of the Neapolitan novels and does not present itself as one. It follows a single line and leaves most of the sequence untouched.

It does not describe any reader’s friendships, and it makes no judgement about them. Nothing here is a diagnosis, and a person who recognises something in these pages is not thereby suffering from anything.

It does not claim that envy is good, harmless, or owed to anybody. It claims that the feeling is produced by an arrangement before it is produced by a character, which is a statement about where it comes from and not a licence for what is done with it.

It makes no generalisation about women in Japan or anywhere else. The figures cited describe what respondents to a government survey reported about their own reasons for moving, and what employers reported about who holds rank. They describe no individual and predict nothing about any reader.

It does not claim to know who Elena Ferrante is, does not repeat or evaluate the identification that was published in 2016, and takes the author’s stated wish not to be identified as settling the matter for this publication.

It implies no endorsement in any direction. The author, the translator, Edizioni e/o, Europa Editions, Hayakawa Shobo, HBO, Rai and the scholars and critics named here have no connection to this house and no knowledge of it. Books are named so that a reader can find them, and for no other reason.

It passes no judgement on the television adaptation, which is recorded here as a fact and has not been read in these pages.

And it does not offer the friendship in these novels as a model. It is often terrible. Two people injure each other for six decades. What is being praised is not the conduct but the accuracy: the book keeps the love and the competition in the same sentence and refuses to resolve them, and that refusal is rarer than it should be.

What is claimed is small and, this Library thinks, load-bearing. The phrase a novel about female friendship is too soft for what the book does. And when two people who grew up the same way are offered one of something, the thing that arrives afterwards in the one who was not chosen is not a flaw that showed up at the wrong moment. It is the shape of the offer, arriving on schedule, in the only place it has to land.