I didn’t know Merve well or Katherine at all when we started. Sarah Chihaya was our linchpin she reached out and gathered us together. What was your relationship to your three co-authors when you first started this project? Richards recently spoke with YaleNews about the book and her collaboration with co-authors Sarah Chihaya, assistant professor of English at Princeton University Merve Emre ’15 Ph.D., associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, and Katherine Hill, assistant professor of English at Adelphi University. By combining personal anecdotes and reflections with their scholarly critique, the collaborators’ conversation has the feel of a virtual book club. Its second part offers essays about aspects of the novels. Its first part collects their informal correspondence about the Neapolitan Quartet. “ The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism” was recently published by Columbia University Press. Richards - an assistant professor of English in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and affiliated faculty member in the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights - and her collaborators never expected their unusual exercise in literary criticism to result in a book, but it has.

In the summer of 2015, Yale scholar Jill Richards took part in a literary experiment with three other academics and critics: They read and critiqued, via emails to each other, the four novels (and international bestsellers) that make up the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet”: “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” and “The Story of a Lost Child.” The series recounts the long and sometimes tumultuous friendship between the fictional Elena (Lenù) Greco and Rafaella (Lila) Cerullo in post-war Naples, and has been widely praised for its depiction of female friendship and for weaving the story of that friendship into a larger tale of an Italian neighborhood and of national politics.

Neapolitan quartet