Following the popular Great Plains Trilogy and published shortly after her Pulitzer winning book One of Ours (1922), Willa Cather’s short novel A Lost Lady (1923) arrived at what was perhaps the peak of her prolific career. In what is one of the most distilled representations of a central theme in Cather’s work, A Lost Lady places a small Great Plains community at the center of America’s conquest and reshaping of the western frontier. Like many of Cather’s novels, this tumultuous historical period is framed by the experience of a primary female figure, the titular ‘lost lady’. Though it has not received nearly the critical attention or canonization of …
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Citation: Perdieu, Zachary. "A Lost Lady". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 March 2021 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7090, accessed 21 November 2024.]