e-Book A Lost Lady download

Willa Cather was a writer of rare gifts. She created her novels in a day and time when women writers were extremely scarce, at least women writers of genuine ability. James Thurber praised her as on a par with Henry James. Her novel "My Antonia" is a recognized classic, and "A Lost Lady" is a work of equal power, the story of a woman caught in a world once romantic and fulfilling, now stifling. The death of her elderly husband sends her on a course of desperation in which she risks everything to experience life once more, and on her own terms. The book itself is so short as to be read in a couple of sittings, but crafted so superbly it seems monumental in its achievement. It is a book that will remain with you, another Cather classic.

The cover shown as posted by Amazon, of a woman looking somewhat seductively posed displays the fact that the person(s) responsible for the cover had a gross misunderstanding of the tale told by Willa Cather or has not read the book. The lady of the title fits the narrator/society's concept of lost, but in the late 19th century, not a contemporary one. It is no "sex in the city." The story is seductive in that we are taken on a journey over the span of life in the late century to the beginning of the 20th. It illustrates the fortune not just of one woman but her husband, loves and of a town. It is a portrait of society during the brief interlude when the development of the railroad was integral to the building of our nation. As the story unfolds we follow the lives of the household which has befriended the orphaned boy who is telling the story. It focuses on 'the Lady' who is beloved and enchanting, only to fall to the later disillusionment of the teller of the tale. How lost the woman is may be left up to the reader, and possibly that is the quest of the novel.

I read this book for my monthly book group. I hadn't read Willa Cather since high school, and had forgotten what a really good writer she is. The story manages to be both charming and disturbing. For the adults out there, Willa Cather is worth a second look.

This is a simply written but thematically complex, metaphoric story, replete with subtle nuances. The events that transpire are seen primarily through the eyes of a boy who comes of age, a contrivance that the author successfully employed in her best selling classic, "My Antonia". Here, it is no less successful. Through the eyes of Neil Herbert, who lives in Sweet Water, a prospective railroad hub on the Western plains in one of the prairie states, the reader gets to know Marian Forrester. She is the much younger, envied wife of one of the town's more prominent and wealthier citizens, Captain Daniel Forrester, a former railroad contractor.

As Neil grows into a man, his adoration of the lovely Mrs. Forrester undergoes a change. He sees her fall from the pedestal from where he and all the townspeople have placed her and sees her, really sees her, warts and all, for the first time, when he discovers her involved in an unexpected peccadillo. It comes as a shock to him that she may not be all that she seems to be. Still, his life is closely entwined with hers, as his uncle, with whom he lives, is Captain Forrester's personal attorney and of the same social standing in this socially circumscribed backwater.

Just as Neil's perception of Mrs. Forrester begins to change in his eyes, so do the fortunes of the town and that of Captain Forrester. As Mrs. Forrester physically deteriorates under the strain of the vicissitudes of fate, so do the town and its surrounding environs. As she revives, leaving behind her old values and adopting new ones that are anathema to those who respect the traditional ones, her revival parallels changes in the town itself, as the old makes way for the new. These changes also parallel the shifts occurring on the American frontier, as social mores and personal values undergo a change, and those stalwart pioneer values give way to new ones.

Beautifully descriptive of a bygone era and laconic in its pace, this is most certainly a novel to be savored. Fans of the author will especially enjoy it.

this poignant portrait of a wonderful but pathetc woman is set in the last days of the dying generation of grand pioneers who opened the west. The reader admires her and pities her. It is done with considerable artistry. Perhaps i am wrong, but the book would have been even stronger if the narrator had been her age and as curiously apart from her as the hero of House of Mirth is from lily bart. But cather's lost lady is more interesting than lily bart, and less lost.