‘A Lost Lady’ is Willa Cather’s brilliant depiction of the decline of the American pioneer spirit and the bleakness of frontier life. In it, socialite Marrian Forrester lives with her husband, the ageing industrial magnate Captain Forrester, in the small town of Sweet Water.

To the young, adoring narrator Niel Herbert, she is both bewitching and beautiful. The very definition of a lady. But Marrian Forrester is not what she seems and sparked by the death of her husband; her social decline lays bare her contradictions to the town.

Published in 1923, Cather’s revered novel is an elegy to the pioneer west. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald acknowledged its influence on his famous work ‘The Great Gatsby’ and the character of Daisy Buchanan in particular.




Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an American writer who won acclaim for her novels that captured the American pioneer experience. Her books include ‘O Pioneers!’ (1913), ‘The Song of the Lark’ (1915), ‘My Ántonia’ (1918) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) which was an instant critical success.

In 1923, Cather gained widespread international recognition when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘One of Ours’, a novel set during World War I.

Willa Cather was granted honorary degrees by Princeton, Berkeley and Yale and in 1931 she graced the cover of Time Magazine. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her a gold medal for fiction in 1944.


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