A Room of One’s Own: Weiblichkeit, Schreiben und kollektive Erfahrung in Elena Ferrantes Tetralogie L’amica geniale (2011-2014) und Annie Ernaux’ Les Années (2008)

With her famous suggestion to «give her [the woman] a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind» from 1929, Virginia Woolf verbalized a core issue of female writing by hinting at the socioeconomic circumstances and domestic obligations of most women – valid at her times, but still today. Both Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux discuss, in their respective novels, the topics of being women in the particular sociocultural land-scape (in Italy and, respectively, in France) after World War II and up to these days, the themes of marriage and motherhood, employment and especially (female) authorship. This article aims to show in a close reading of both Ferrante and Ernaux that the two writers play with the literary form of the (auto-)biography on a diegetic, but also extradiegetic level, while formulating at the same time a collective work that embraces the experience of wom-anhood but circumvents the hazard of a merely subjective and sensitive writing, as female writing has sometimes been claimed to be.