A Lost Lady (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Willa Cather
- First Published: 1923
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Realism, Domestic realism, Regional fiction
- Subjects: Family or family life, North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Class conflict, Twentieth century, Nineteenth century, Midwest, Adultery, Small-town life, Gossip, Railroads, Frontier or pioneer life, Nebraska, Grasslands
- Locales: Nebraska
A Lost Lady is Cather's elegiac portrait of the spirit of an earlier age. In her depiction of Marian Forrester, the much-admired figurehead of culture and society in the town of Sweet Water, Cather evokes a quality of life that began, for her, to vanish sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century. To Cather, much of what was wrong with twentieth century life was the absence of those qualities that Mrs. Forrester embodies: charm, warmth, and a certain graciousness of manner that has no place in the harsher climate of an industrialized society.
The novel traces...
[The entire page is 959 words long]
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