A scene of reading found early in My Brilliant Friend, the opening novel in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, seems to have supplied Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards with the model for the “experiment in collective criticism” they stage in The Ferrante Letters, a book in which they mean, ambitiously, to lay down “first a procedure and then the beginning of a tradition” (3). When Ferrante has her first-person narrator, Lenù Greco, recall how she and another neighborhood girl, Lila Cerullo, near the end of their final year of primary school, bonded through their impassioned reading of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, the novelist invites her readers to equate friendship with shared reading and conversation about reading. The Ferrante Letters, a collective project of “reading and writing about women reading and writing” (2), also tells a story about friendship, one it interweaves with reflections on Ferrante's fiction...

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