Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Verified Quotes
“As if it had learned something by its bruises, it pecked and crept its way along the branch and disappeared into its own hole”
“because a thing that is dreamed of in the way I mean, is already an accomplished fact”
“I never considered they paid their wives a compliment”
“He had given her a year of his life, and she had thrown it away”
“He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer”
“It was what he most held against Mrs. Forrester; that she was not willing to immolate herself, like the widow of all these great men, and die with the pioneer period to which she belonged; that she preferred life on any terms”
“I knew that if we fell, we'd go together; he would never drop me”
“she had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring”
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.