Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Book Summary: Elena Ferrante’s Epic of the 1970s

Welcome, fellow bookworm! The third Neapolitan Novel is where Elena Ferrante’s saga becomes truly epic. This Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay summary follows Elena and Lila into the turbulent 1970s — a decade of feminism, political violence, labor struggles, and personal reinvention. If the first two books were about becoming, this one is about the price of arrival: what happens when two brilliant women finally get the lives they fought for, and discover those lives are battlegrounds too.

Whether you’re continuing the series, leading a book club discussion, or writing about one of the defining literary works of our time, this complete summary of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante gives you the full plot, the characters, the themes, and the lessons — all in original, reader-friendly form. Let’s return to Naples.

Book and Author Details

Author Background: Elena Ferrante, writing under a pseudonym, is the Italian author of the Neapolitan Novels, translated into English by Ann Goldstein. Her fiction — fierce, unsparing, psychologically exact — has made her one of the most discussed novelists in the world, with the HBO adaptation of the series bringing Elena and Lila to an even wider audience.

Publication Details: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta) was published in Italian in 2013 and in English in 2014 (Europa Editions), 400 pages. It is the third of the four Neapolitan Novels.

Genre and Audience: Literary fiction / historical epic / feminist literature. For readers of literary fiction, book clubs, students of modern Italian history, and anyone who has followed Elena and Lila this far — essential reading before the finale.

Table of Contents

• One Minute Book Summary
• The Book in Three Sentences
• Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay — Full Summary
• Characters
• 6 Main Key Lessons and Concepts
• Quotes
• Conclusion

ONE MINUTE BOOK SUMMARY

Set in the politically explosive 1970s, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay finds Elena married to the academic Pietro Airota, living in Florence with two young daughters, struggling to write while drowning in domesticity. She publishes a well-received first novel, becomes involved in the feminist movement, and rekindles her consuming affair with Nino Sarratore — eventually leaving her marriage for him and returning to Naples. Lila, meanwhile, remains in Naples working in a sausage factory, becomes a fierce labor activist, teaches herself computer programming, and builds an improbable new career in technology. Through strikes, terrorism, marital collapse, and the devastating 1980 Irpinia earthquake, the two women’s lives intertwine and diverge — ending with Lila entrusting Elena with the notebooks containing her life’s writings.

The Book In Three Sentences

Elena escapes Naples for marriage, motherhood, and literary ambition in Florence, only to find domestic life suffocating her talent and her identity. Lila stays in Naples, transforming herself from factory worker to labor militant to computer programmer through raw intelligence and refusal to surrender. When Elena’s marriage collapses and she returns to Naples, the two friends confront the central truth of their lives: leaving and staying were never really choices, only different forms of survival.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Book Summary

Part One: Elena in Florence — Marriage and Motherhood

The novel opens with Elena married to Pietro Airota, living in Florence, mother to two daughters, Adele and Elsa. On paper it is the life she dreamed of: a respectable husband, a comfortable home, entry into the intellectual world. In reality it is a slow suffocation. Pietro, well-meaning but conventional, expects a traditional wife; the children consume her days; her writing — the thing that was supposed to justify everything — stalls. Elena feels herself dissolving, becoming an appendage to her husband’s career.

Salvation comes in the form of work. Elena publishes her first novel, a book drawing on her own life, and it is modestly successful — praised by feminist critics, discussed in the women’s movement circles she begins to frequent. For the first time, she has an identity beyond wife and mother. But success brings its own vertigo: she is celebrated for a frankness about female experience that embarrasses Pietro, and she begins to wonder whether her talent is real or merely a product of Lila’s long shadow.

Part Two: Lila in Naples — The Factory and the Fight

While Elena navigates literary Florence, Lila endures the brutal world of the Soccavo sausage factory in Naples. The work is dehumanizing — cold, noise, relentless speed — but Lila, as always, refuses to be broken. She becomes involved in labor organizing, clashing with both the owners and the cautious union leadership. Her intelligence, which once designed shoes, now dissects power structures. She is fearless in confrontations, and her fellow workers both admire and fear her.

Then comes Lila’s most astonishing reinvention: she teaches herself computer programming. In the 1970s, computing is an elite, male-dominated field, yet Lila masters it through sheer obsessive study — the same obsessive study that once made her the smartest girl in the neighborhood. She parlays this into work with the factory’s parent company, escaping the production line for the world of machines and code. Enzo Scanno, her steadfast partner, studies alongside her. Together they build a fragile, hard-won stability, raising her son Gennaro.

Part Three: The Affair and the Return

Elena’s carefully built life detonates when Nino Sarratore re-enters it. Their affair — passionate, consuming, years in the making — becomes the center of her existence. Elena leaves Pietro, takes her daughters, and moves back to Naples to be with Nino, who promises a shared intellectual and romantic life. For a brief, incandescent period, she is happy: writing flows, love feels real, Naples feels like home.

But Nino is Nino — brilliant, charming, and constitutionally unfaithful. Elena discovers his betrayals, and the dream collapses. She is left in Naples, a single mother with a stalled career, forced to rebuild yet again. It is here, in the wreckage, that she begins writing the book that will make her famous: a raw, honest novel about Naples itself. And it is Lila — who has watched all of this with her characteristic unsentimental clarity — who pushes her toward the truth she needs to write.

Part Four: Earthquake and the Notebooks

The novel’s climax arrives with the terrible Irpinia earthquake of November 1980, which devastates Naples and the surrounding region. In the chaos and grief that follow, the bonds between the characters are tested and reforged. Elena, now a successful author, must decide what kind of writer — and what kind of woman — she will be. The book ends with one of the series’ most powerful gestures: Lila entrusts Elena with a tin box containing her notebooks — her writings, her life, her mind on paper. It is an act of absolute trust, and it sets up the final volume’s central mystery.

Characters

1. Elena Greco (Lenù) — The narrator; a published author caught between marriage, motherhood, feminism, and her consuming love for Nino.
2. Raffaella Cerullo (Lila) — Factory worker turned labor activist turned programmer; her reinventions defy every expectation.
3. Pietro Airota — Elena’s husband; a decent, traditional academic who cannot understand his wife’s ambitions.
4. Nino Sarratore — The brilliant, faithless love of Elena’s life; charisma masking deep unreliability.
5. Enzo Scanno — Lila’s loyal partner; quiet strength and steadfast devotion.
6. Gennaro (Gennarino) — Lila’s son; growing up between his mother’s ferocity and an unstable world.
7. Adele (Dede) and Elsa — Elena’s daughters; the joys and constraints of her motherhood.
8. Bruno Soccavo — The sausage factory owner; embodies petty capitalist cruelty.
9. Michele Solara — The neighborhood’s menacing power broker; his shadow reaches into every life.
10. Professor Galiani’s circle — The intellectual and feminist world that both elevates and judges Elena.

6 Main Key Lessons and Concepts

1. Core Message: There is no clean escape — from class, from gender, from the past. Elena leaves Naples but carries it inside her; Lila stays but transforms herself beyond recognition. Freedom is not a place but a practice, renewed daily.

2. Purpose: Ferrante uses the 1970s — feminism, labor militancy, terrorism — to show how history lives inside private life. The novel argues that the personal and political are inseparable, especially for women.

3. Audience: Readers of the series, feminists, students of Italian history, and anyone interested in how ambition and motherhood collide. The novel speaks powerfully to women balancing creative work with family.

4. Foundational Insight: Reinvention is possible at any age and from any starting point — Lila’s journey from factory floor to computer programming proves it — but reinvention always costs something. The question is never whether you can change, but what you will sacrifice to do so.

5. Supporting Ideas: The women’s movement both liberates and disappoints Elena; male “genius” (Nino) is often just charisma plus freedom from consequences; writing requires the courage to betray the people you love; motherhood and creativity are not opposites but rivals for the same hours; Naples itself is a character — wounded, vital, inescapable.

6. Practical Implications: For readers: Elena’s story asks whether you are living your ambitions or someone else’s script for you — her return to writing only happens when she stops performing respectability. For writers: study how Ferrante weaves historical events (strikes, the earthquake) into intimate narrative without ever lecturing. For book clubs: debate the title’s provocation — did Elena really “leave,” and did Lila really “stay”?

Quotes

“I was a woman who had left, and I was returning.”

— Elena, on moving back to Naples. The sentence carries the whole novel’s paradox: every departure contains a return.

“She was right: I had to write, and to write I had to be free.”

— Elena’s realization. Creativity demands a freedom that marriage, motherhood, and respectability constantly threaten.

“Lila had always known how to fight; I had only known how to study.”

— Elena’s comparison. Two kinds of intelligence, two kinds of survival — neither sufficient alone.

“The earthquake took everything, and gave back only what mattered.”

— On the 1980 disaster. Catastrophe as a brutal clarifier of values.

“Write it all, Lenù. Don’t leave anything out.”

— Lila, entrusting her notebooks. The charge that becomes the entire series: tell everything, spare no one, especially yourself.

Conclusion

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the hinge of the Neapolitan Novels — the volume where girlhood fully becomes womanhood, and where Ferrante’s themes achieve their fullest expression. The 1970s setting is not decoration but engine: feminism gives Elena a language for her discontent, labor struggle gives Lila a battlefield worthy of her ferocity, and political violence reminds both women how fragile every gain is. It is the most overtly political book in the series, and the most devastating about love.

For readers and students, this novel offers an unparalleled portrait of how large historical forces shape intimate choices. Watch how Elena’s feminism complicates rather than simplifies her decisions — the movement gives her concepts but not answers. Watch how Lila’s self-education in programming mirrors her childhood self-education: the same relentless mind, now applied to machines instead of shoes. And notice how the earthquake functions as both literal disaster and metaphor: everything these women built gets shaken, and what survives is what was real.

The ending — Lila’s notebooks passing into Elena’s hands — is one of modern literature’s great cliffhangers, and it leads directly into the finale, The Story of the Lost Child. Read on to discover what Lila wrote, what happened to the friendship, and why Lila disappeared. You have come too far with Elena and Lila to stop now — the final volume awaits, and it will change how you see everything that came before.