A Lost Lady is a 1923 novel by American writer Willa Cather. It tells the story of Marian Forrester and her husband, Captain Daniel Forrester, who live in the Western town of Sweet Water along the Transcontinental Railroad. Throughout the story, Marian—a wealthy married socialite—is pursued by a variety of suitors and her social decline mirrors the end of the American frontier.[1] The work had a significant influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby.
Plot summary
Niel Herbert, a young man who grows up in Sweet Water, witnesses the slow decline of Marian Forrester, for whom he feels very deeply, and also of the West itself from the idealized age of noble pioneers to the age of capitalist exploitation.
Major characters
Niel Herbert – the main character who meets Mrs. Forrester as a young boy. He falls in love with what she represents and struggles to preserve his boyhood image of her. After watching her first have an affair with Frank Ellinger and later Ivy Peters, he finally leaves Sweet Water. Niel realizes by the end of the novel that his love of Marian was based on Captain Forrester's idealization of her.
Mrs. Marian Forrester – a charming socialite and the wife of Captain Forrester. Niel falls in love with what she represents, and is dismayed to discover her affair with Frank Ellinger. After her husband's death, she becomes the mistress of Ivy Peters who runs her estate. She eventually leaves the town and moves to California, dying before Niel ever sees her again.
Captain Daniel Forrester – an aging man of the Pioneer generation who made his fortune building track for the railroads in the old days. He is proud of his beautiful wife. The novel opens at a time when he has already been physically destroyed by a fall from a horse. After suffering two strokes he eventually dies, signifying the end of the pioneering era.
Frank Ellinger – a muscular bachelor and businessman of the Gilded Age generation. Frank is Mrs. Forrester's lover and visits her when the Captain is away from the house. He marries Constance Ogden.
Ivy Peters – a cocky and pretentious older boy of the Jazz Age generation who later becomes a lawyer. He becomes very wealthy and eventually succeeds in owning the Forrester estate.
Constance Ogden – an envious Southern girl who is Niel's age and who is envious of Marian's beauty. She later marries Frank Ellinger.
Judge Pommeroy – Niel's uncle, he is a lawyer that falls on hard times much the way the Forresters do.
Willa Sibert Cather (/ˈkæðər/;[1] born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873[A] – April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.
Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. She is buried alongside Lewis in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire, plot.
Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.