On Sunday, readers awoke to the news that one of the world’s outstanding literary mysteries may have finally been solved. In an article published on the website of The New York Review of Books, and simultaneously in French, German and Italian publications, the journalist Claudio Gatti wrote that Elena Ferrante — the pen name for an Italian novelist whose true identity was a closely guarded secret — is actually a Rome-based translator named Anita Raja. Using financial records, Mr. Gatti makes a seemingly irrefutable case that Ms. Raja is the author of the books that made the name Elena Ferrante famous around the world, including her four Neapolitan novels.

That series, which follows the lives of two girls in a poor neighborhood in Naples from childhood to maturity, feels so powerfully authentic that many readers have assumed it reflected Ms. Ferrante’s own experience. But as it turns out, Ms. Raja’s history is very different from those of her heroines, Elena Greco and Lina Cerullo. Ms. Raja was born in Naples, but she moved to Rome at the age of 3 and grew up there. Her father was Neapolitan, but not poor — he was a magistrate. Her mother was a German Jew who fled to Italy in the 1930s to escape Nazism, and who lost most of her family to the Holocaust. None of these facts could be gleaned from the novels.

The immediate reaction of many readers to these revelations was, perhaps surprisingly, anger and disgust. On social media, many Ferrante devotees have condemned Mr. Gatti and those who published him. After all, Ms. Ferrante has been vocal about her need for privacy and her refusal to participate in the celebrity-author game. Her publishers have faithfully protected that privacy, even as her books sold millions of copies and made guessing her identity a favorite literary parlor game. Yet now that Mr. Gatti has seemingly won the game, nobody seems very pleased. Hiding from the world may have been a prerequisite for Ms. Ferrante’s creativity, raising the unhappy prospect that the identification of Ms. Raja may mean the end of her work.