This chapter adopts, describes, and critiques three complementary perspectives on children’s literature: (1) psychoanalytic studies of and interpretations of children’s books; (2) effects of psychoanalysis on the work of children’s book authors and artists; (3) ways in which psychoanalysis might learn from the wisdom of children’s literature. Among the authors discussed are Bruno Bettelheim, Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter, and Elena Ferrante.

This chapter explores Elena Ferrante’s use of Virgil’s Dido as a model for Elena and Lila, the two protagonists of the Neapolitan Novels, through the lens of absence. Not only is Ferrante able to conjure and comment on the Aeneid’s treatment of one of its most divisive characters following the classical rules of intertextual engagement with the ghosts of masterpieces past; she ends up changing the whole game. By teasing narrative material out of Virgil’s silences in Dido’s story-arch, Ferrante centres and requalifies the very reason of Dido’s undoing – the trauma which stems from the loss of love – as the generative force behind both Elena’s and her own literary output. However, by making Lila’s invisible writing and her subsequent disappearance into the beating heart of Elena’s writing, Ferrante uses Virgil as her Muse to stage a woman-centred takeover of literary greatness. Elena’s anxieties over how much of Lila’s life she has truly cannibalized, and her responsibility in Lila’s disappearance, not only take Virgil to task for hiding his Muse, but suggest an alternative model of criticism; moving beyond the postmodern view of the absent author and his unaccountability by giving agency back to the Muse.

Francesco Guicciardini, as we saw, famously attributed Italy’s ‘ruin’ after 1494 to Piero upsetting the balance of power between Milan and Naples by ‘throwing himself into the arms of Ferrante’ and ‘totally alienating Milan’. He was, of course, judging Piero in the light of what happened after the event, when Lodovico Sforza’s alliance with the king of France seemed to be a determining factor in the king’s victory and the overturning of the Medici regime. But before the French arrived in Italy, the situation was more fluid and Piero more concerned with preserving the balance held by his father than Guicciardini suggests. He was in fact wary of Ferrante and was in close contact with Lodovico, but since his diplomacy was often secret, like his father’s, hidden even from ambassadors like Piero Guicciardini in Milan, it is likely that Piero Guicciardini’s son, Francesco the historian, was unaware of it. Although the dispute over the lands had spoilt Piero’s visit to Rome, it only threatened Italy’s balance of power after the pope created the League of St. Mark to recover the lands from Virginio Orsini in April 1493. By following Piero’s moves in the face of this threat, we can understand better his secretive strategy to keep the old balance alive.1