75 pages 2 hours read

Elena Ferrante

The Story of a New Name

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Character Analysis

Elena Greco

The novel’s first-person narrator, Elena, has a “face taken up by my glasses” and is short and bosomy. She has light hair that goes blonde in the summer sun (59). She is, for the most part, “a very brilliant student” who excels in essay writing and manages (against the odds) to leave her impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood of her birth and study at the Pisa Normale (396). However, Elena feels that the secret of her writerly success comes from Lila, who writes in her notebooks with an immediacy and clarity that Elena at first envies, then absorbs as a style that is both Lila’s and her own.

As an impoverished high school student in shabby clothes, Elena sometimes envies the luxury Lila has attained by marrying Stefano. However, during her own self-improvement, in school, and through her contact with Professor Galiani, she imagines the ideal of what she wants to become: a middle class young woman like Professor Galiani’s daughter and Nino’s one-time girlfriend Nadia, whose “every gesture or movement had gracefulness” (69). Elena, who comes across this type of well-bred person in Pisa, fears that her working class origins will betray her and keep her from achieving her ideals, regardless of how she excels in her studies.

Related Titles

By Elena Ferrante

Plot Summary

logo

The Days of Abandonment

Elena Ferrante

The Days of Abandonment

Elena Ferrante

Study Guide

logo

The Lost Daughter

Elena Ferrante

The Lost Daughter

Elena Ferrante

Study Guide

logo

The Lying Life of Adults

Elena Ferrante

The Lying Life of Adults

Elena Ferrante

Study Guide

logo

The Story of the Lost Child

Elena Ferrante

The Story of the Lost Child

Elena Ferrante

Study Guide

logo

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Elena Ferrante

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Elena Ferrante