Twelve-year-old Neil Herbert is charmed by Mrs Marian Forrester, the wife of the older Captain who was instrumental in bringing the railroad to the West. Set in a Nebraska town in the late 19th Century, Neil has his idealized view of the beautiful, gracious Mrs Forrester changed as he discovers some indiscretions. But Mrs Forrester is not the only lost lady. The American pioneering spirit is being replaced by exploitation by the bankers, industrialists, and other capitalists at the turn of the c...

Load up on details about landscape, and the weight takes the story down. I've been wedded to that view for a LONG time, but I recently got a divorce -- thanks to A Lost Lady. Well, maybe not a divorce, but I've agreed to a trial separation. The surprises in the plot of A Lost Lady are not the came-out-of-nowhere type. Cather's characters are fascinating. And her descriptions of the natural world are actually interesting. Who knew? Other readers, of course. And now I do. I should have read Cather...

Set in the fictional prairie town of Sweet Water, Nebraska. A Lost Lady is the story of Mrs. Marian Forrester and young Neil Herbert who adores her. The way she takes care of her husband, the stately manner she comports herself, is perfection in the eyes of Neil. But Marian is not perfect, and she begins her downfall in Neil's eyes when he discovers she is having an affair while her husband is away. Later in the story, after her husband has died, Marian has a relationship with the despised Ivy P...

[4+] A multi-layered portrait of a woman in the late 19th century, from the perspective of an affable, traditional young man (Niel) who who becomes disappointed when she falls from her perch as an idealized lady. Thus the title. But the reader sees more than he does. Cather writes about Marian with breathtaking clarity, somehow allowing us to see her complex desires through Niel's romanticized, narrow lense. This novel is a masterful accomplishment that I have been thinking about since I finishe...

I struggled and I think mostly failed to figure out how to capture this powerfully compact little book. We're still in Nebraska, "in one of those grey towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer today than they were then". But Cather's style and perspective are evolving. There is a bitterness to her writing, which is new. She is attacking the zero-principle, zero-ethics destructive evolution of American capitalism. And her prose here has what I think is a new sharpness. But she...

2.5 starsThis is a fairly brief work by Cather; written after the Plains trilogy and before her more reflective later works. It is set in a western town called Sweet Water built on the Transcontinental Railway. It tells the story of Captain Forrester and especially his younger wife Marian. It is mainly told by a young man Niel Herbert. His uncle Judge Pommeroy is the local lawyer. The centre of the book is the character of Marin Forrester who might be described as a socialite somewhat stifled by...

Four and a half.The elegant, beautiful Marian Forrester captivates not only her older husband, Captain Forrester, an elderly railroad pioneer, but also everyone she meets. She has energy, spirit and a passionate nature which helps in her move to the small town of Sweet Water, but she is also reckless and vulnerable. Captain Forrester values his wife and basks in her glory. He makes allowances for her behaviour and accepts her with an open heart.This slim novel is powerful and very moving. Beauti...

Continuing my fanship of Willa C, this slows my stride a little. Niel comes of age, and about time, too. Mrs Forrester needs therapy that she never gets because the Age-Era-Time within which she lives hasn't yet had its coming of age. Everyone has to be someone else's version of what ought to be. . .stuck in the amber of time and social conditioning. The story really rubs me wrong because the characters I'm most hopeful for are cemented in their descriptions, and it almost feels that they are sa...

Willa Cather is the outstanding American writer of the 20thC. An insightful stylist, she penetrates the heart. Her themes : America gradually moves into the "modern world," and Americans painfully come to terms with life. Niel Herbert gets to know Mrs Forrester when he's 12 and she is in her 20s, married to a much older, kindly gent. He's dazzled. The story criss-crosses their lives and changing America. She suffers setbacks; he grows up and begins to understand the heartbreak of adult lives. As...

Jul 9, 11am ~~ Review asap. Lots of layers to ponder first.Jul 13, 1pm ~~ I have read much Willa Cather (pre-GR) but not this 1923 title, so when I saw it show up at Project Gutenberg recently I wanted to read it right away. And now I want to re-read the other Cather titles on my shelves so one of these days I will round them up, make another list, and have little project for next year!But meanwhile, back to A Lost Lady. I had not read reviews or blurbs about this book before opening the book, I...

This was my second read by Willa Cather. It is a much shorter book than My Antonia and it is not an epic (I am not sure My Antonia is one, but it looked like that to me). And yet, I think I liked A Lost Lady more. It reminded me of The Great Gatsby and Brideshead Revisited, but it is a lot better than any of these.

Free download available at Project GutenbergI made the proofing of this book for Free Literature and Project Gutenberg will publish it.". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Come, my coach!Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies;Good night, good night."

This was one of those books that I felt was only okay while I was reading it, but when I finished it and started analyzing it, I really appreciated and enjoyed it. Cather is really growing on me as an author. I like her understated prose, and I like that her characters can simultaneously be symbols, yet vibrant and complex people that defy simple descriptions.Cather thought of this book as a character study, which is gutsy, as Marian is narrated almost entirely through other people (and men, at

“A lost lady” was a big surprise for me. Hadn’t I known that Cather had written it, I would have never brought up her name. The slow decline of the seductive Mariane Forrester reminded me much more of Edith Wharton’s acerbic style or even of Flaubert’s aesthetic frivolities of his female protagonists. Narrated in indirect style by Niel Herbert, an impressionable young man besotted with the irresistible charms of Mrs Forrester, the novel provides a tone, a lyric and an ethical vision of life that...

Earlier this year, in the Fall, my family decided to go through all of my grandma's old books. She was a literature professor, so this was a pretty big task. My aunt boxed them all up and brought them in her van to the family reunion. My mom and her two sisters spent an entire morning going through the books, dividing them up like players in a fantasy football draft. I came in later and set a few aside for myself. I was looking at this book, A Lost Lady, when my cousin came in and told me how in...

Willa Cather (1873-1947)It has been some time since I've opened one of "Willa" (Wilella Sibert) Cather's books, but not because my experience with the first two - O Pioneers! and Lucy Gayheart - was in any manner disappointing. On the contrary, I was so pleased with them that I purchased the Library of America's lovely two volume edition of her works. But you all know how one is torn by the siren calls of so many appealing authors, not to mention tossed upon the streaming rocks by life itself.

A young man grows up worshiping an older, gracious woman but he can't forgive her for choosing a vigorous, full life over his youthful, staid definition propriety. You can feel his angst over his puppy love for her battling the static vision he needs from her. She however, has her own longing to keep living and loving to her fullest ability. They both find a type of peace in the end. Cather explores how well we can actually know and understand others. As a young woman the aging heroine married a...

My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2017/12/16...

A Lost Lady is both an outstanding portrait of transitional America as well as a character sketch of a pioneering woman in a small prairie town of the central plains: Mrs. Marian Forrester. Her husband is an aging older man, influential and wealthy, who made his fortune in the railroad business. She is a woman with charm, passion, and intelligence, admired by many in the rural town of Sweet Water. The story follows her life, a life seemingly of quiet satisfaction and steadfast loyalty, through t...

In my review of Lucy Gayheart, I noted this from the blurb: "(Cather) . . . performs a series of crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture . . ." I could say the same about this book. I really enjoyed this one about Mrs. Forrester a young woman married to a much older man, Captain Forrester, who has helped build railroads. They live in a small Nebra...