A Lost Lady
By (Author) Willa Cather
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
15th July 2025
United Kingdom
Paperback
128
Width 110mm, Height 180mm, Spine 10mm
99g
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . Marian Forrester enchants everyone around her- her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her unwavering confidant. Yet, her irresistible charm and dazzling wit conceal a dangerous vulnerability - and her greatest secret. A significant inspiration for The Great Gatsby, this exquisite novella is a poignant elegy for a bygone era, fading into history.
Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska, with its wide open plains and immigrant farming communities, at the age of nine. This landscape would deeply affect her later writing. She attended university and became a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh, and then a magazine editor in New York. Her first major novel, O Pioneers!, appeared in 1913 and was followed by two more in her prairie trilogy, The Song of the Lark and My ntonia, as well as her masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop. She lived with the editor Edith Lewis for thirty-nine years until her death in 1947.