Willa Cather

A Lost Lady Willa Cather

Marian Forrester is the symbolic flower of the Old American West. She draws her strength from that solid foundation, bringing delight and beauty to her elderly husband, to the small town of Sweet Water where they live, to the prairie land itself, and to the young narrator of her story, Neil Herbert. All are bewitched by her brilliance and grace, and all are ultimately betrayed. For Marian longs for "life on any terms," and in fulfilling herself, she loses all she loved and all who loved her. Niel Herbert, the young narrator of Willa Cather's "A Lost Lady," is haunted by the reckless, flawed loveliness of the heroine of that novel, her passionate power for life, "the promise," when her eyes for a moment laughed into his, "of a wild delight" such as he might never know. A Lost Lady is undoubtedly a masterpiece. A highly concentrated novel, widely regarded as the closest of Willa Cather's books to perfection in form. Willa Sibert Cather (1873-1947) American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.