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Title: A Lost Lady (Willa Cather Scholarly Edition) by Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, Kari A. Ronning, Susan J. Rosowski, Willa Silbert Cather ISBN: 0-8032-1427-8 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: May, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $75.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Homeless on the Range
Comment: This book is from Willa Cather's middle period of writing -- between My Antonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop. This may be the least known but best portion of her output.
As does My Antonia, The Lost Lady pictures the American frontier in the middle west and its closing due to urbanization, the demise of the pioneer spirit, and commercialization.
Together with its picture of the changing of the West, the book is a coming of age novel of a special sort and a portrait of a remarkable, because human and flawed, woman.
As with many of Cather's works the story is told by a male narrator, Neil Herbert. We see him from adolescence as an admirer of, and perhaps infatuated by Marian Forrester, the heroine and the wife of a former railroad magnate now settled on a large farm in South Dakota. Neil matures and leaves to go to school in the East. We see his idea of Ms. Forrester change as he learns that there is both more and less to her than the glittering self-assured woman that meets his young eyes.
The book is also the story of Marian herself, of her marriage, her self-assuredness, and her vulnerabilty. She is independent and a survivor and carries on within herself through harsh times and difficult circumstances, including the change in character of her adopted home in the midwest.
This is a tightly written, thoughtful American novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: a lost lady
Comment: A novel of retrospection, A Lost Lady (1923) tells of events several decades earlier, when the rapid growth of the railroads was both expanding - and ending - the western frontier. But that is the larger, the national, backdrop against which more intimate dramas are played out, dramas that have to do with youth and age and beauty, and with adultry, sadism, and the growth of a young man, Niel Herbert. Niel idolizes Captain Forrester's young wife, Marion, and in this he is not alone. All who visit the Forrester's home find Marion's warmth and vitality captivating. In Cather's imagination, Mrs Forrester embodies the natural energy of the west itself: ageless and utterly unselfconscious of its own vibrant beauty. So, too, the Captain stands for all that once was the best in America but is now being lost in a greedy bid for money and land; the Captain is a man of conscience - strong, honorable, solid as a mountain. Their home, Sweet Water, is a kind of Eden on the prairie, and even the willow stakes he planted to mark his property lines come to bloom.
Over time, as Niel matures, his "lady" too ages. And when the Captain dies, she falls on bad times, hurt rather than aided by advice from her lawyer. Her fall however is as much moral as it is financial - or at least it is in Niel's eyes. He notes that she has begun to use cosmetics and sherry. He finds her voice too loud, her laughter too forced. Niel loses his lady- or perhaps he gives her up.
There is a kind of poignancy to this brief novel, and a unity that is as pleasing as the story itself. It is, on the one hand, the story of the West's golden youth and fading future. On the other hand, it is the story of a young man's growth and an aging woman's refusal to live as others would prefer.
Rating: 5
Summary: As brilliant as it is short
Comment: In the opening sentence of this short novel, Cather describes Sweet Water, the Nebraska town in which it takes place, as "so much grayer today" than it was a generation or so before, when the story takes place. When she wrote those words in 1923, she couldn't possibly have known how prophetic or poignant they would be today, as that part of the country has continued to lose population and become dotted with ghost towns in the decades since then. But sad as that may be, it only adds to the brilliance of this story of times that changed and a community that didn't keep up with the changes.
As per usual for Cather, her heroine is seen mostly through the eyes of a young male character, about whom we know less in the end than we do about the woman he tells of. Taking place toward the end of the nineteenth century, it's a coming of age story for the both of them and for the land they call home, and, one could argue, for America at large. (Subtlety always was among Cather's strongest points; it's never easy to tell for certain whether her stories really are only about individuals or whether they're intended as an allegory for the loss of her beloved Midwestern frontier.) As the times change, so does the place of her protagonist, Mrs. Forrester, in the insular community due to some circumstances she can't control and some she can but won't. Like the title itself, the story ultimately leaves it up to us to decide whether she is ultimately better or worse off at the end than at the beginning and whether her fate reflects poorly on her friends and neighbors or herself, or both.
The one certainty is a loss of youthful exuberance on the part of the town as a whole, which Cather paints vividly as a bustling young community at first and a wounded, declining one not long thereafter. We're left on our own to decide what it all says about Mrs. Forrester, her generation, women in society as a whole, and Cather's own opinions about it all. It's not easy to leave so much ambiguity without leaving the reader frustrated, but remarkably, that's just what happens here.
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Title: My Mortal Enemy (Vintage Classics) by Willa Cather ISBN: 0679731792 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 31 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Professor's House (Vintage Classic) by Willa Cather ISBN: 0679731806 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 31 October, 1990 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, Doris Grumbach ISBN: 0395345308 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 10 May, 1983 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage Classics) by Willa Cather ISBN: 0679728899 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 16 June, 1990 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: My Antonia by Willa Cather ISBN: 039575514X Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 21 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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