A Lost Lady

Summary

A Lost Lady (1923) is a short novel in two parts about Marian Forrester, wife of Captain Daniel Forrester, a railroad contractor who built hundreds of miles of the Burlington line across the plains and into the Black Hills. The narrator places the story "thirty or forty years ago" in Sweet Water, one of the grey railroad towns of Nebraska, and the Forrester house on its low hill above a winding creek and marsh is its centre. To the railroad aristocracy who stop off the express, and to the town boys who fish in the Captain's meadows, Mrs. Forrester is gaiety and grace itself. The story is seen mostly through Niel Herbert, nephew of the Captain's lawyer, Judge Pommeroy. Niel first enters the house as a boy of twelve, carried up the hill with a broken arm after falling from a tree, and Mrs. Forrester's kindness that day fixes his devotion. He grows up idealizing her as the embodiment of the pioneer generation's large-hearted elegance. Cather sets beside him Ivy Peters, a cold boy who slits the eyes of a woodpecker with a taxidermist's blade, and who grows into a shrewd lawyer with no reverence for anything. Part One ends with two blows. Niel, bringing wild roses to Mrs. Forrester's window at dawn, hears her laughter with Frank Ellinger, a handsome bachelor from Denver, and understands that she is unfaithful. Then a Denver savings bank in which the Captain was a director fails, and he gives up nearly his whole fortune so that the working-men depositors can be paid in full. He suffers a stroke soon afterwards. In Part Two Niel returns from his studies in Boston to find the Forresters poor, the Captain an invalid, and Ivy Peters renting their meadows; he has drained the marsh to grow wheat. Niel gives up a year to help nurse the Captain. Mrs. Forrester drinks, depends on Ivy for investments, and breaks down on a stormy night when she learns that Ellinger has married; Niel cuts the telephone wire to keep her abuse from the town's operators. After the Captain's death she seems to lose all bearing. When Niel sees Ivy Peters casually embrace her in her kitchen, he leaves Sweet Water without saying goodbye. Years later he learns that she remarried in South America and, until her death, paid for flowers on the Captain's grave. Cather's novel is an elegy for the pioneer West and an inquiry into what Niel actually loved. It asks whether Mrs. Forrester betrayed an ideal or whether Niel demanded that a living woman die with an era. Its spare chapters, many of them single scenes, are a model of economy for student writers. The affair is presented without explicit description, but its presence and Mrs. Forrester's drinking make the book better suited to older students.

Plot or Argument

• Part One, Ch. I: The house on the hill

  The narrator describes the Burlington railroad aristocracy, Captain Forrester's career as a road-builder, the house and marsh at Sweet Water, and Mrs. Forrester, twenty-five years younger than her husband, welcoming important guests from Omaha and Denver.

• Part One, Chs. II-III: The picnic and the woodpecker

  A group of town boys picnic in the Forrester grove. Ivy Peters blinds a woodpecker; Niel, climbing to put it out of its misery, falls and breaks his arm. Mrs. Forrester nurses him with brandy and sends for Dr. Dennison. Niel's background with his uncle Judge Pommeroy is given.

• Part One, Chs. IV-VI: The winter dinner and the cedar grove

  Niel, now nineteen and reading law in his uncle's office, attends a dinner where the Captain tells how he chose the Sweet Water hill and gives his philosophy of the dream that is already an accomplished fact. Frank Ellinger visits; Adolph Blum, hunting, sees Mrs. Forrester and Ellinger alone in the cedar ravine and keeps her secret.

• Part One, Chs. VII-IX: The roses and the bank failure

  Niel reads the classics in his uncle's office. At dawn he brings wild roses to Mrs. Forrester's window and hears her with Ellinger. The Captain returns from Denver having sacrificed his fortune to pay a failed bank's depositors, then suffers a stroke. Cyrus Dalzell visits; Niel leaves for Boston.

• Part Two, Chs. I-IV: Ivy Peters' meadows

  Two years later Niel returns to find Ivy Peters leasing the Forrester land and the marsh drained. The Captain, slowed by illness, tends his roses and sundial. Mrs. Forrester admits she depends on Ivy for investments. Learning of Ellinger's marriage, she crosses the flooded creek at night to telephone him, and Niel cuts the wire.

• Part Two, Chs. V-VI: The Captain's last illness

  A second stroke leaves the Captain helpless; townswomen invade the house while Mrs. Forrester collapses, until Niel takes charge of the nursing. The Captain dies in December; Adolph Blum brings flowers to his funeral.

• Part Two, Chs. VII-IX: After the pioneers

  Mrs. Forrester entertains the town's young men, with Ivy Peters as host, and tells again the story of how the Captain carried her out of a canyon. Niel sees Ivy embrace her and leaves for good. Years later Ed Elliott tells him of her remarriage to Henry Collins in Buenos Aires and her death.

Characters

• Marian Forrester, the lost lady

  Charming, quick, gallant and restless; she brightens every room and cannot bear dullness or isolation, and she survives the Captain's ruin by compromises Niel cannot forgive.

• Captain Daniel Forrester, railroad builder

  A heavy, slow-spoken man of few words and absolute integrity, crippled by a fall in the mountains, who pays a failed bank's depositors out of his own fortune.

• Niel Herbert, centre of consciousness

  Judge Pommeroy's nephew, who worships Mrs. Forrester from boyhood, nurses the Captain, and judges her harshly before coming to remember her with gratitude.

• Ivy Peters, lawyer and speculator

  A boy who blinds a woodpecker for sport and a man who drains the Forrester marsh, cheats the Indians of land, and takes over the Forrester place.

• Judge Pommeroy, Niel's uncle, the Captain's lawyer

  An old-fashioned gentleman lawyer of the Captain's generation whose methods no longer work in the new commercial town.

• Frank Ellinger, Denver bachelor

  A big, handsome man of forty whom Mrs. Forrester loves; he marries the heiress Constance Ogden for safety and money.

• Cyrus Dalzell, railroad president

  President of the Colorado & Utah, a warm old friend of the Forresters from the days of their prosperity.

• Adolph Blum, town boy

  A poor German boy who hunts in the Forrester marsh and silently guards Mrs. Forrester's secret out of loyalty.

• Ed Elliott, town boy, later a mining engineer

  One of the picnic boys, who meets Mrs. Forrester years later in Buenos Aires and brings Niel the last news of her.

Lessons

• The Captain's honour

  When the Denver bank fails, Captain Forrester could have shielded his wife's comfort with government bonds. He pays the working-men depositors instead and comes home poor. Cather presents this as the code of the pioneer builders: a man's name stands behind his word even when the law does not require it.

  • Why does the Captain refuse to shelter his property, and what does Judge Pommeroy think of the choice?
  • How does Mrs. Forrester respond when she hears the news, and what does her response reveal?
  • Is the Captain's integrity rewarded within the novel? Should we expect it to be?

• Draining the marsh

  Ivy Peters drains the meadows the Captain kept for their beauty and plants wheat. Niel sees the act as spite and as the new West's habit of cutting everything into profitable bits. The marsh becomes a symbol of the difference between owning land to use it and owning it to love it.

  • Why did the Captain leave the bottom land undrained when it could have been productive?
  • What does the blinded woodpecker scene tell us about Ivy Peters before he grows up?
  • Is Niel's contempt for Ivy fair, or does Cather let us see some prejudice in it?

• Loving an image, judging a person

  Niel worships Mrs. Forrester as the ornament of a heroic age and condemns her when she will not die with it. Cather lets the reader see both the beauty of his devotion and its injustice. The novel's ending, with Niel grateful that she was cared for to the last, shows a judgment being softened by time and charity.

  • What exactly does Niel hold against Mrs. Forrester at the end of Part Two?
  • Does the novel agree with him? Use the final chapter as evidence.
  • What is the difference between admiring someone and making an idol of them?

• Caring for the helpless

  The Captain's strokes test everyone around him. The townswomen use his illness as a chance to pry; Mrs. Forrester collapses; Niel gives up a year of study to keep watch. Cather finds quiet honour in the night vigils of a young man who keeps faith with an old one.

  • What does Niel gain from the year he gives to nursing the Captain?
  • Why does the narrator describe the Captain's illness as a social revival for the town?
  • How does the Captain's gratitude for quiet and his roses show his character in weakness?

• Economy of scene

  Cather tells a story spanning decades in short chapters, often a single scene each: a picnic, a dinner, a sleigh ride, a telephone call. She leaves out what a longer novel would explain, so the reader must infer. Students can learn from her how much a chosen detail, like a bunch of roses thrown into a mudhole, can carry.

  • What does Niel's throwing away the roses tell us without the narrator explaining it?
  • Why might Cather show the affair through Adolph Blum and Niel rather than directly?
  • Pick one chapter and list what is left out. How does the omission shape your reading?

Context

The novel looks back from the 1920s to the 1880s and 1890s, when the Burlington and other railroads were extending across Nebraska and Colorado, financed by Eastern capital and led by contractors and 'land company' men. The bank failure and the Captain's ruin echo the financial panics of the period, especially that of 1893. Cather contrasts the generation of builders and gentlemen ranchers with the smaller, sharper men who followed them and bought up their land.

Composition

Cather drew Marian Forrester partly from Lyra Garber, wife of Silas Garber, a former governor of Nebraska who lived near Red Cloud, the town of Cather's childhood. She wrote the book after learning of Mrs. Garber's death. It was serialized in The Century Magazine in 1923 and published by Alfred A. Knopf the same year, shortly after Cather's Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours.

Reception

Reviewers praised the book's restraint and beauty, and it has remained one of Cather's most admired short novels; F. Scott Fitzgerald admired it and later wrote to Cather fearing that The Great Gatsby might seem to echo it. Two Hollywood films were made, in 1924 and 1934; Cather disliked the second and afterwards refused to allow adaptations of her work. The novel is often read as a central text of her 'démeublé' or unfurnished style.

Comparisons

• My Ántonia

  Both novels are told through a young man's memory of a woman from his prairie childhood; Jim Burden's Ántonia endures and is fruitful, while Niel's Mrs. Forrester is lost, so that the two books show opposite outcomes of the same frontier.

• The Great Gatsby

  Fitzgerald admired A Lost Lady and worried Gatsby echoed it: both have a narrator who idealizes a charming woman, both mourn a vanished promise, and both end with the hero of the dream dead and the woman gone elsewhere.

• O Pioneers!

  O Pioneers! celebrates Alexandra Bergson's labour in taming the land; A Lost Lady comes after that generation's triumph, when the builders are old and the land falls to speculators.

• Death Comes for the Archbishop

  Cather's later novel of missionary priests in New Mexico shows pioneers sustained by faith and vocation; the Forresters have honour and charm but no such anchor, which helps explain Mrs. Forrester's drift.

• The Age of Innocence

  Wharton's Newland Archer, like Niel, judges a woman by the codes of an older society and comes in later life to a softened memory; both novels were published in the early 1920s looking back on the previous century.

Quotes

Medical Lens

A Lost Lady is not a medical novel, but illness and injury shape its plot. The Captain is crippled by a fall with his horse, suffers a stroke after his financial ruin and a second one that leaves him helpless, and is nursed at home by his wife, by Niel and by a servant before his death. Cather is attentive to the social side of caregiving: the townswomen treat his illness as an opportunity, and Mrs. Forrester, exhausted, sustains herself on coffee and brandy. Her drinking is reported by Ivy Peters and by the narrator; it should be read as part of her decline rather than diagnosed. The country doctor, Dennison, sets Niel's broken arm and attends the Captain. Mrs. Forrester's story of her own broken legs, which had begun to knit before a surgeon arrived from San Francisco and had to be broken again, gives a glimpse of frontier surgery.

• Part One, Ch. I

  The narrator mentions the Captain's fall with his horse in the mountains, which broke him so that he could no longer build railroads.

  Disability Deformity Aging Senescence
• Part One, Ch. II

  Niel falls from a tree and breaks his arm; Mrs. Forrester gives him brandy by the spoonful and Dr. Dennison sets the arm.

  Physicians Doctors Pain
• Part One, Ch. VIII

  The Captain is found breathing stertorously on his bed after his return from Denver; Judge Pommeroy telephones Dr. Dennison that he has had a stroke, and he is kept in bed for three weeks.

  Aging Senescence Physicians Doctors Nursing Caregiving
• Part Two, Ch. I

  Ivy Peters tells Niel the Captain is 'only about half there' and that Mrs. Forrester takes good care of him but seeks consolation in French brandy.

  Alcohol Nursing Caregiving
• Part Two, Ch. V

  After a second stroke the townswomen take over the house, Mrs. Forrester collapses and lives on black coffee and brandy, and Niel takes charge of the nursing and night vigils.

  Nursing Caregiving Alcohol Aging Senescence
• Part Two, Ch. VIII

  Mrs. Forrester recounts her fall in a canyon, the litter-less carry out on the Captain's back, and the surgeon who had to re-break her healing fractures.

  Surgery Pain

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the scene of Mrs. Forrester's life in South America that Ed Elliott could not see: an evening on Henry Collins's ranch when she remembers Sweet Water.

• Essay

  Is Niel Herbert a reliable judge of Marian Forrester? Argue from the roses scene, the telephone scene and the final chapter.

• Classroom

  In the manner of Cather's short chapters, write a single-scene vignette of no more than 500 words in which one physical object carries the emotional meaning without explanation.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Captain Forrester and Ivy Peters about what land is for, letting each speak in his own idiom.

Further Reading

• My Ántonia, Willa Cather

  Cather's 1918 novel of Nebraska memory, the natural companion to A Lost Lady.

• Not Under Forty, Willa Cather

  Cather's essays, including 'The Novel Démeublé', which explains the spare method of A Lost Lady.

• Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, Sharon O'Brien

  A study of Cather's early life and development as a writer.

• Willa Cather: A Literary Life, James Woodress

  A standard full biography.