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The magic of contradictions: Willa Cather's lost lady.(American novelist)

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From: New Criterion
Date: 19990201
Author:Dickstein, Morris

Willa Cather's novel "A Lost Lady" portrays a more tragic sense of life than her earlier novels "O Pioneers!" and "My Antonia." Cather wrote of how the Midwest was settled and "A Lost Lady" tells the story of the wife of a railroad builder. It deals with the difficult tension between the limitless possibilities imagined by the spirit and the limitations of actual life.

First published in 1923, when Willa Cather was almost fifty years old, A Lost Lady occupies a special place in her rich and varied body of work. Though it never gained the wide popular appeal of My Antonia or Death Comes ...

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