The Days of Abandonment takes part of a long tradition of feminist writing about “crazy” women — one that runs from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, all the way to Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Often these works reimagine tragic figures of classic myth, and find in female madness an ecstatic dissolution or transcendence. Hysteria is reclaimed as an affirmation of woman unbound. These stories are fine, but not always for me; like Olga, I have too much pride to embrace the type. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante offers an alternative — one that doesn’t minimize the symbolic power of female malady but captures the double consciousness of a destroyed woman who doesn’t want to be “a woman destroyed.” Olga is, without doubt, a hysteric: she’s nervous, emotionally excessive, and prone to dissociation. But she resists this hysteria with a pride and tenacity I recognize. Becoming the poverella doesn’t mean breaking like a knick-knack in the hands of a man, as Olga once thought — it means seeking triumph in spectacular self-destruction, like Dido on the pyre. To resist the poverella is not to resist her fate, but to pass through it like a crucible: become the poverella, then become Olga again. A person with a name, not a martyr.