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 Ã?ntonia or Death Comes for the Archbishop, which became staples of the school curriculum, it has long been a novel that critics admire extravagantly and ordinary readers recall with passionate enthusiasm. The early reviews were laudatory but a little condescending, for Cather’s “portrait of a lady” is barely longer than a novella and centers on a single character. To Edmund Wilson it was “a charming sketch performed with exceptional skill.” Joseph Wood Krutch found it “short and slight,” not “a great novel” but “that very rare thing in contemporary literature, a nearly perfect one.” But the tide was turning by 1937 when Lionel Trilling, not Cather’s greatest admirer, described it as “the central work of her career. Far from being the delicate minor book it is often called, it is probably her most muscular story.” Later critics, including Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds (1942), followed Trilling in seeing A Lost Lady and its even darker successor, The Professor’s House (1925), as Cather’s pivotal works, affecting, powerfully imagined, and strikingly modern even in their recoil from modern life.

The early readers who described the book as a character sketch saw only the brilliance of Cather’s portrayal of Marian Forrester, the high-spirited wife of one of the great pioneers and railroad