Short cuts

he sense of writing for Elena Ferrante – and of all the struggles it involves – has to do with “the satisfaction of staying beau-tifully within the margins and, at the, translated as ever by Ann Goldstein, was first delivered as a series of lectures – by others in place of the pseudonymic author. The book, which will only take an afternoon to read with its hundred or so well-spaced pages, explores her influences, methods and writing struggles, along the way examining the work of earlier authors and influences such as Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein.