Maybe it’s because I was brought up Baptist, a faith which practises total immersion, but there’s nothing I enjoy more book-wise than total immersion in a writer’s work. And the summer holidays are a good opportunity to do this.

So this month’s new lesson 50 in Complete Freelance Writing Course is about Elena Ferrante’s book In The Margins, On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. The author, whose true identity is a mystery, is best known for her Neopolitan novels, following the lives of two friends in post-war Naples. They are stories exploring emotions, the lives of women, and how personal narratives get caught up in political and social upheaval. The character of Napoli is most vivid and beautifully depicted in the books and in the HBO tv series ( 4 seasons) based on the novels, called My Brilliant Friend.

Unlike many books on writing, this one is not prescriptive or filled with the sense that the author knows best and has a formula that all of us can learn from. This has a much more subjective tone, where Elena Ferrante careers around her own experience and what she’s learnt from it, to draw some conclusions about her writing, and the part writing plays in women’s lives. She writes about the impact of discovery and experiment with first person writing, and how she categorizes writing into the diligent and that without boundaries. She reveals how she decides that all reality in fiction is created by a narrator, who inevitably will bring their own subjective take into play.

However much we may like to feel we have a unique perspective as writers, Elena Ferrante points out that all writing is inherited and comes from previous creation. She seems extremely well-read and incisive in who she chooses as influences, like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Emily Dickinson, for instance.

At a time when literacy levels and interest in reading are reported to be declining, this is an inspiring reminder of the value and contribution of an author steeped in literary tradition, who is also a great entertainer.

If you’re a writing student, and you do the be-more-Elena exercises at the of this lesson, as ever please do send them over if you’d like to. Otherwise, do hope you enjoy some immersive reading currently, which may inspire your own writing. Off here in the meantime to read Elena Ferrante’s first ever novel, as another treat…