Dolors's Reviews > A Lost Lady

“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 goes beyond the accurate portrayal of this lost lady.

Cather seems to link the inexorable degeneration of an idealized woman with the extinction of the pioneers’ American dream.
It’s the end of the nineteenth century and a new era has come to the Wild West. The engineers and railroad workers have lost their status to bankers and tradesmen, and women smoke and banter with their husbands, something never seen before.
As young Niel grows up, his poetic, dreamy essence vanishes.
When the mask of romantic infatuation falls down from his face, the true nature of Mrs. Forrester is revealed, history has moved on and a new page is about to be written, leaving all glories of past days as mere postcards, blurred memories of better versions of ourselves.
Quite an enlightening novella, and one that will introduce the reader to a less known facet of this romantic writer.