The Lost Daughter
A woman on holiday admits she once left her children for three years, and does not entirely regret it.
Leda, a forty-eight-year-old literature professor, takes a solitary seaside holiday and finds herself watching a young mother and her small daughter on the beach. The watching becomes a fixation. When she picks up and keeps the child's lost doll, the theft sits unexplained even to herself, and the present preoccupation pulls up a memory she has kept at a distance: the years she spent away from her own two young daughters.
Ferrante writes the pull to leave the maternal role from the inside, and lets it stand without repair or apology. The narration follows how a buried act resurfaces through an object and a stranger rather than through direct recall. Leda accounts for her own motives unreliably, softening and revising as she goes, so the reader works against the telling as much as with it.
The 2008 English edition was translated by Ann Goldstein for Europa Editions.
About the author
Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of an Italian author who has published fiction since the early 1990s and has chosen to remain anonymous. Her real identity is not publicly known, and she has declined to attach a public face to the work. She is best known for the Neapolitan Novels, a four-book series that begins with My Brilliant Friend, and for the earlier novel The Lost Daughter. Her fiction is written in Italian and widely translated.
Details
- 2006
- Italian
- Europa Editions
- Europa Editions
- 160
- 9781933372426