A Lost Lady

Marian Forrester is the eponymous “lost lady” of the story. She comes from a wealthy California family and was initially engaged to marry a millionaire who was killed by the husband of a married woman. Marian was sent away to avoid scandal and broke both of her legs while mountain climbing in the Sierras. She met Daniel Forrester after he rescued her, and she fell in love with his strength and devotion to her. At the beginning of the novel, Marian maintains a pampered life, entertaining important railroad luminaries in Sweet Water and enjoying elite diversions in Colorado during the winter. She is charming, beautiful, and vivacious, and has the unique ability to captivate every man she meets. She has an adventurous spirit and craves entertainment, requiring parties, dancing, and admiration. She deeply loves and respects her husband but carries on an affair with Frank Ellinger so that she can still feel desirable. When the Forresters lose their fortune and her husband is incapacitated by a second stroke, Mrs. Forrester becomes unhinged. She drinks too much and abandons all semblance of respectability, causing the townspeople to mock her. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Forrester strays even farther from the decorous behavior expected of someone of her social status. She engages in an affair with Ivy Peters, who promises to help her earn enough money to move back to California. Eventually she marries a rich Englishman, Henry Collins, regaining her social status and wealth. She ends her days with him in Buenos Aires.

Mrs. Forrester straddles the line between independent indulgence and traditional respectability. She can behave in ways that most women of her time are not because of her singular charm and beauty. Above all, Marian is a survivor who knows what she wants in life, and she is willing to upend social conventions to achieve it. She refuses, metaphorically, to immolate herself on her husband’s pyre and insists on making a new life for herself on her own terms.

Captain Daniel Forrester served as an officer in the Civil War and then made a fortune building roads for the Burlington railroad. He is large, imposing, and well groomed. A man of action rather than words, he is genteel and gracious, prizing honesty, integrity, and courtesy. Captain Forrester met Marian Ormsby in the Sierra Mountains. When she fell while mountain climbing and broke both of her legs, he carried her to safety and fell in love with her strength and zest for life. They married and moved to Captain Forrester’s dream home in Sweet Water, though they also wintered in Colorado. Captain Forrester is unable to work after a riding accident, then suffers two strokes. His fortune is lost when he insists on paying the depositors at a failed bank, of which he is a director. Captain Forrester dies and is buried with his beloved sun dial as a grave marker.

Captain Forrester symbolizes the heroic pioneer class that the author idealizes and celebrates. He is part of a bygone era, a more principled and chivalrous time, when the men who settled the West did so out of a dream of turning nothing into something. He loves the land itself, its wildness and natural state. His passing symbolizes the end of the pioneer era.

Ivy Peters is a few years older than Niel. He’s shown to be cruel, arrogant, and condescending when he cuts out the eyes of a woodpecker to impress Niel and his friends. He is nicknamed Poison Ivy because he poisons dogs for fun and has a repugnant, swollen red face. Ivy resents the Forresters and wants to prove that he is “just as good” as members of the upper class. Ivy becomes a lawyer and gains control of the Forrester land, destroying the wildness of the place that Captain Forrester loved. Ivy manages Mrs. Forrester’s money and eventually becomes her lover, symbolizing how the unscrupulous new Westerners have taken power away from the dignified pioneers. Ivy eventually brings a wife from Wyoming and buys the Forrester place. Ivy represents the breakdown of Sweet Water’s social stratification and the new class of greedy, immoral Westerners who displace the noble pioneers.