Willa Cather's A Lost Lady

The sky was burning with the soft pink and silver of a cloudless summer dawn.  The heavy, bowed grasses splashed him to the knees. All over the marsh, snow-on-the-mountain, globed with dew, made cool sheets of silver, and the swamp milk-weed spread its flat, raspberry-coloured clusters.  There was almost a religious purity about the fresh morning air, the tender sky, the grass and flowers with the sheen of early dew upon them.  There was in all living things something limpid and joyous -- like the wet, morning call of the birds, flying up through the unstained atmosphere.  Out of the saffron east a thin, yellow, wine-like sunshine began to gild the fragrant meadows and the glistening tops of the grove.
Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (Vintage Books,1923)

Marian Forrester is the lost lady, living in Sweet Water with her older, retired, husband Captain Forrester, a former magnate of the railroad (Sweetwater is also the name of the town awaiting a railroad in Sergio Leone's great film Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968).  Once the captain becomes bankrupt Marian continues to keep up appearances as best she can, until her husband dies.  While he is still alive she has adulterous affairs, unsuccessfully hidden from Neil Herbert, an admirer of hers whom she casts aside when the captain dies. Great things were expected of the Western town of Sweet Water, but the town gradually became isolated and forgotten and Marian moved away.

For years Neil and his uncle, the Dalzells and all her friends, had thought of the Captain as a drag upon his wife; a care that drained her and dimmed her and kept her from being all that she might be. But without him she was like a ship without ballast, driven hither and thither by every wind.  She was flighty and perverse.  She seemed to have lost her faculty of discrimination; her power of easily and graciously keeping everyone in his proper place.

Cather's style is marvelously low-key, observing landscapes, personalities and relationships from various points of view and showing us how individuals are shaped by their time and their environment.  Marian was originally engaged to a millionaire of the Gold Coast when she was nineteen and weeks before the wedding her espoused was shot and killed by a jealous husband.  She went on a retreat into the mountains, fell while hiking, and was rescued by the captain. We only find this out at the end of the book.

The end of an era; the sunset of the pioneer.  This sums up much of Cather's work.

There were two movies made from Cather's book.  I have not seen Harry Beaumont's version (1924), but the version made by Alfred E. Green in 1934 is a brisk programmer (a mere 61 minutes), with a lovely performance by Barbara Stanwyck and little to do with the book.  I am unaware of any author who liked the movie made from their book (with the possible exceptions of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut) and Cather so disliked what Warner Brothers did with her book that she stipulated in her will that no more movies could be made from her books.