The Lost Daughter

By Elena Ferrante

"Elena Ferrante will blow you away."-Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

From the author of The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter is Elena Ferrante's most compelling and perceptive meditation on womanhood and motherhood yet. Leda, a middle-aged divorce, is alone for the first time in years when her daughters leave home to live with their father. Her initial, unexpected sense of liberty turns to ferocious introspection following a seemingly trivial occurrence. Ferrante's language is as finely tuned and intense as ever, and she treats her theme with a fierce, candid tenacity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Mar 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781609451035

Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), and The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008), now a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, and Jessie Buckley. She is also the author of Incidental Inventions(Europa, 2019), illustrated by Andrea Ucini; Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa, 2016); and a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night (Europa, 2016). The four volumes known as the “Neapolitan novels” (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child) were published by Europa Editions in English between 2012 and 2015. My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series directed by Saverio Costanzo, premiered in 2018 and is in its third season. Ferrante’s most recent novel is the instant New York Times bestseller, The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, 2020).

Reviews for The Lost Daughter

[fionaanne · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was one of those books that I was largely indifferent to until right at the very end, when the writer threw me a curveball that I hadn't seen coming and suddenly I thought, "Oh! Clever!" and felt a little stupid at my lack of insight. Truthfully, I would have seen it coming if the book had been more engrossing initially.

Many thanks to Europa Editions who provided me with this free review copy.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Motherhood comes as naturally as air to some. To others, not so much. Leda is one of those others. Whether the fault lies in the tensions of her upbringing (it is possible that Leda’s mother also felt the unnaturalness of her state) or in some peculiar admixture of traits unique to Leda, or, a further possibility, whether the so-called naturalness of motherhood has never been more than a fiction foisted on women — whatever the case, Leda’s actions both in the past and in the present make her the subject of censure. Both public censure and private, since Leda frets upon her own unnaturalness ceaselessly but ineffectually.Leda is at a seaside holiday taking a break from her work as an English professor in Florence. Over the course of the next few weeks she will have cause to reconsider, though not reconcile, her decisions and actions as a mother. Early in her marriage and with two young daughters, Leda determined to reclaim her personal space, even her personal destiny, and abandoned both daughters and her husband. For just over three years she had no contact with them, only to return and reclaim them. Her current solitude is due to her, now adult, daughters having left to spend time in Canada with her ex-husband. But the physical lacerations we inflict on others and ourselves are as nothing to the psychic self-punishment we mete out unknowingly. And certainly Leda’s perceptions and eventual actions on the crowded sandy shore suggest that she has not yet reconciled herself to her earlier abandonment.This is a closely narrated study of obsession and anxious self-regard, much in keeping with Ferrante’s other early novellas. And equally stunning in its impressive control, delicate balance of public and private anxieties, and barely contained violence. Ferocious. And as always with Ferrante, highly recommended.

[snash_44 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting exploration of the many ambivalent and tangled feelings of a mother for her daughter and motherhood, often more unconscious than in this book. The plot, however, didn't seem believable. It may have worked symbolically but not in reality.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Zelfs in kleine romans, niet meer dan een kortverhaal eigenlijk, weet Ferrante te excelleren. Wat me opvalt is de gecomplexeerdheid van haar hoofdpersonages: altijd vrouwen die worstelen met hun zelfbeeld, en dus ook met wat anderen en de maatschappij van henr verwachten, en die in het bijzonder in beslag genomen worden door hun relatie tot hun moeder of tot hun kinderen. In dit verhaal is Leda niet per sé een sympathiek figuur, ze noemt zichzelf ronduit een slechte vrouw en ze heeft dingen gedaan die vanuit de goegemeente met een scheef oog worden bekeken. Maar Ferrante zal haar hoofdpersonages nooit veroordelen, integendeel, ze eist respect voor hen op, voor hun complexiteit en kleinheid, en hun negatieve kanten. Een groots klein verhaal is dit.

[bobbieharv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting book that preceded the four My Brilliant Friend series but with the same themes: almost obsessive female friendship, a beach, a doll. My theory is that all of this is disguised autobiography and that her brilliant friend really exists, or existed, and she's writing and writing to try to find her.

[c_why · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What is the big to-do with Elena Ferrante? I managed to finish this one because it was short, but a previous book of hers I abandoned. Aged, embittered chick-lit.

[williecostello · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Lost Daughter is an intriguing, if not quite enthralling, read. Its prose is direct and its story simple, but beneath this placid surface is a dark psychological undercurrent that suffuses the story with a disorienting and disturbing uncanniness.In simplest terms, The Lost Daughter is a meditation on womanhood and motherhood. The protagonist and narrator is a 48-year-old woman, physically separated and emotionally estranged from her two twentysomething daughters, though still deeply defined by the relationship she had and still has with them. As the story progresses, the reader is told more and more about the narrator's past, and made to feel the psychological torment that being a mother and being a woman has caused her. Simultaneously, the narrator is relating her interactions with a family she encounters while on vacation, all of whom she can't help but view through her own personally clouded lens.This synopsis may make the book sound like a thriller, but there is nothing sensational to its story: no plot twists, no grand conflicts, no unsolved mysteries. But The Lost Daughter does have the same eerieness and captivation often found in thrillers, expressed in its intense psychological portrait of a woman.Nonetheless, I was not entirely won over by this novel. Occasionally the narration was a little too explicit, spelling everything out for the reader. At other times the level of description just fell flat. But overall, I was left with the impression that though Ferrante is certainly a competent author, The Lost Daughter is perhaps not her best work. I look forward to reading something else of hers in the near future.