A LOST LADY

The story of Marian Forrester, a wife and then a widow in a small Nebraska town, and Niel Herbert, the narrator, who has been devoted to her since he was a child, is one of Cather''s lesser-known novels, but considered by many to be one of her best. Marian is a refined and civilizing presence in the rough town to which her marriage to a rich man takes her, but after a devastating love affair, followed by her husband''s death and the loss of her money, she makes changes in her life that, at first, Niel fails to understand. It''s only years later that he is able to see that her life was, in fact, a work of art with its own logic--that the woman he revered but considered "lost" was in fact the mistress of her fate, and a woman he can continue to admire.