A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
Published by Alfred A. Knopf (1923). Numerous editions since then.
A Lost Lady was Cather’s first novel after her essay, “The Novel Démeublé” (The Unfurnished Novel), in which she declared,
How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended; leave the scene bare for the play of emotions, great and little—for the nursery tale, no less than the tragedy, is killed by tasteless amplitude. The elder Dumas enunciated a great principle when he said that to make a drama, a man needed one passion, and four walls.
Cather was fresh from winning the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922, 460 pages), and her first novel, The Song of the Lark (1915) had come in at slightly under 500 pages, so at 174 pages in its original Knopf edition, A Lost Lady represented a significant change in approach. In addition, she had chosen to base her story on that of Lyra and Silas Garber, a well-to-do couple (Garber had been governor of Nebraska in the 1870s) who lived in a mansion on a bluff outside Red Cloud, where Cather grew up. As Edith Lewis, her partner, wrote in her memoir, Willa Cather Living:
Although A Lost Lady has been regarded by many critics as the most perfect in form of all her novels, Willa Cather had, at the start, more trouble with it than with any of the others. As a rule she was unhesitating in her attack on a new piece of work. She did not try first one way and then another, but took at once, with sureness and great momentum, the road she wished to follow. Her difficulty in the case of A Lost Lady arose largely, I think, from the fact that Mrs. Forrester was more a direct portrait than any of her other characters except Antonia; and although Mrs. Garber, from whom Mrs. Forrester was drawn, and her husband, Governor Garber, were both dead, some of their relatives were alive and might be (and, indeed, were) offended. Probably because of this, she at first set the scene of her story in Colorado, and wrote it at some length in this setting. But she found it would not work. Her memories of Mrs. Garber, and of the Garber place, were among the strongest, most enduring impressions of her childhood; a whole ambiance of thought and feeling surrounded them, and she could not transfer them to an artificial climate. So she started the story anew, writing of things just as she remembered them.
Cather herself wrote to her publisher, Alfred Knopf, as she was still trying to finish the book:
What I want to do is to find a few qualities, a few perfumes, that haven’t been exactly named and defined yet. And if I have a publisher who is interested in new tastes and smells, I can go a good way toward finding them. This story [A Lost Lady] is an example of what I mean; it’s a little, lawless un-machine-made thing—not very good construction, but the woman lives—that’s all I want. I don’t care about the framework—I’ll make any kind of net that will get, and hold, her alive.
From reviews and commentaries:
• H. L. Mencken, The American Mercury, February 1924:
Miss Cather’s A Lost Lady has the air of a first sketch for a longer story. There are episodes that are described without being accounted for; there is at least one place where a salient character is depicted in the simple outlines of a melodrama villain. But this vagueness, I suspect, is mainly deliberate. Miss Cather is not trying to explain her cryptic and sensational Mrs. Forrester in the customary omniscient way of a novelist; she is trying, rather, to show us the effects of the Forrester apparition upon a group of simple folk, and particularly upon the romantic boy, Niel Herbert. How is that business
achieved? It is achieved, it seems to me, very beautifully.
The story has an arch and lyrical air; there is more genuine romance in it than in half a dozen romances in the grand manner. One gets the effect of a scarlet tanager invading a nest of sparrows—an effect not incomparable to that managed by [Joseph] Hergesheimer in Java Head. But to say that A Lost Lady is as sound and important a work as My Antonia—as has been done, in fact, more than once in the public prints—is to say something quite absurd. It is excellent stuff, but it remains a bit light. It presents a situation, not a history.
• Robert Littell, The New Republic, December 19, 1923
A Lost Lady is…in the line of an old and substantial tradition of fiction. Its method is the familiar one of revealing a character by telling only what happened and what the character said. The character occupies the foreground; the author’s preoccupations, if any, are happily concealed. Miss Cather does not pretend to know any more about her Lost Lady than she can make a reader understand. She accomplishes exactly what she sets out to do, and no more. Such purpose and self-restraint go far to explain the singular reality and solidity of the heroine, who remains in our minds as one of one most vivid inhabitants of any American novel of recent years, but they do not explain her charm.
In Miss Cather’s phrase, we are watching “the sunset of the pioneer,” when “the men who had put plains and mountains under iron harness were growing old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from’ death. It was already gone, that age, and nothing could bring it back.” But The Lost Lady “was not willing to immolate herself, like the widow of all these great men, and die with the pioneer period to which she belonged. She preferred life on any terms.” Gifted with too much life, she spent its gold freely—which was her charm, and when the gold was gone, she spent desperately the small change of it, penny by penny—which was her tragedy..
• Time, September 10, 1923
My enthusiasm for her latest book is unqualified. One of Ours, her story of the War, which was awarded one of the Pulitzer Prizes last year, I did not care for. It is not nearly so wise a book as Edith Wharton’s poignant A Son at the Front or Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat. A Lost Lady, however, is a character study of strength and beauty. The story of a highstrung, attractive, weak woman, told as she is reflected in the lives of her various lovers, is superbly wrought. I can think of no other picture of broken idealism so striking as that of young Neil confronted with the truth about his idol, Marian Forrester. The background of the Middle West of the last century seems thoroughly inconsequential. The story is that of Marian Forrester. Here, surely, is one of the most brilliant technicians in American letters!
We will be talking about A Lost Lady on:
US: Monday, 29 July
7:30-8:30PM Eastern
6:30-7:30PM Central
5:30-6:30PM Mountain
4:30-5:30PM Pacific
Australia: Tuesday, 30 July
9:30-10:30AM Australian Eastern
9-10AM Australian Central
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