Anita Raja is Elena Ferrante

One of literature’s most talked-about mysteries appeared to have been cracked with the unmasking of the identity of the Italian publishing sensation Elena Ferrante.

In its wake, a literary row erupted over journalistic ethics and writers’ right to protect their identities and the personal back stories that may, or may not, inform their work.

Claudio Gatti, an Italian investigative journalist, says he has seen evidence of royalty payments that establish that Ferrante is a pen name for Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator, who is married to a well-known novelist.

Reacting angrily to Gatti’s revelation, Ferrante’s publisher did not deny his claim. Instead it railed against the perceived breach of the writer’s right to privacy. “It is disgusting to see a great Italian author, loved and celebrated in our country and across the world, treated like a criminal,” Edizioni E/O said in a statement. “What higher public interest could the investigation led by Claudio Gatti have served ” Ferrante’s best-selling novels, particularly her Naples-based quartet, have been acclaimed for their intricate, compelling storytelling and insights into the nature of female friendship.

Her success has been fuelled by media interest in the mystery over the author’s identity with the until-now anonymous Ferrante having granted only a handful of interviews conducted via emails passed on by her publisher.

Gatti’s scoop was based on leaked records of payments made by Ferrante’s publishers, for whom Raja also worked, which appear to correspond to the royalties the best-selling novelist would have been due.

Assuming that Raja is Ferrante, it appears that the author of My Brilliant Friend has been complicit in misleading the literary world and her millions of fans into thinking she was the daughter of a Neapolitan seamstress familiar with the backdrop of post-war poverty against which her most famous novels are set.

Gatti defended his story, published on Sunday by the New York Review of Books and outlets in Italy, France and Germany, on the grounds that Ferrante was a public figure and that she had “lied” about her life story.

“When millions of books are bought by readers, in a way I think readers acquire the right to know something about the person who created the book,” the journalist told BBC Radio 4.

Gatti argued this was particularly true in light of Ferrante’s publication in 2003 of Frantumaglia, an ostensibly autobiographical collection of non-fiction writings which the reporter described as “full of untruths”. “As a journalist I don’t like lies and I chose to expose them,” Gatti said.

While Raja was born in the southern city, she was raised from the age of three in middle class comfort in Rome by her magistrate father and a mother of Polish Jewish heritage who had escaped the Holocaust as a young girl and never lost her German accent.