Lost Lady

Niel Herbert arrives in Sweet Water, Colorado, a raw frontier town being tamed by the railroads, and finds himself transfixed by Marian Forrester: beautiful, Magnetic, devastatingly alive. She is the wife of Captain Forrester, the legendary railroad magnate whose glory days are fading as the West hardens into something less romantic. Niel builds Marian into an idol, a symbol of everything wild and fine and worth believing in. Then he discovers she is having an affair, and his faith collapses not just in her, but in the entire mythology she represented. Cather's 1913 novella is a ruthlessly clear-eyed elegy for the passing of the American frontier and the illusions that sustained it. It is also an uncomfortable, necessary examination of how men build women into symbols and then punish them for being human. Marian is no saint. She is something more interesting: a person, complicated and compromised, caught between the mythology men create and the reality they refuse to accept. The prose has the stark, windswept beauty of the plains themselves, and the ending lingers like a wound.