Motherhood and womanhood in Ferrante's The Lost Daughter

This is a vacation novella about the dynamics between women. Of mothers and daughters; sisters and sister-in-laws; and strangers on a beach.

Leda, a middle-aged English literature professor, is divorced and freshly free from the responsibilities of fretting and caring for her two grown daughters. She takes herself on a solo vacation at the beach. Here, stretched for days under the sun and in the midst of other holiday goers, she finds herself involved in a tightening intrigue with a Neapolitan family sharing the shore.

We are throughout the story within the mind of Leda, who becomes voyeuristic in her obsession with a young mother, her small daughter and the toddler's doll. She compares the trio with her own memories of her tumultuous time raising her own two daughters. Alone on vacation, she observes then implicates herself into the scenes of family drama unfolding next to her on the beach. The plot is wound around the disappearance of the treasured doll. As the tense vacation unfolds, we are at once alienated and inextricable from the narrator, whose motivations and actions remain unknown until sudden reveals cast all that came before into new light. Leda is not completely honest with the reader, because she remains unknown to herself.

The novel toggles between the professor's reflections on her years of motherhood behind her, and her private musings on the pair of young mother and toddler playing in the sand. She envies the young woman as a devoted mother, resents the child for being an untainted vessel for maternal love. She invents parallels between the two and her past life as a young mother, imagines the two strangers as embodying reminders of her own failings. Through sharp inner dialogue and a fraught narrative, Ferrante weaves a rich meditation on the angst, fears and despair of becoming a mother, and the irreconcilable yearning of becoming a woman on your own terms.

Ferrante is uncomfortably honest about the trials of motherhood, its inherent contradictions with being a modern woman. In less than 200 pages, she masterfully explores the pitfalls of being a mother, a daughter, a sister, and how the multitude of ways in which we hurt each other shape the experience of being a woman. It is through existing intimately with these other women in our lives, her story suggests, that we end up the women we become.

The Lost Daughter is a short, punchy holiday read that, like all of Ferrante's work, both transports us to Italy and comforts us in our own daily angst. She assures us our fears and frustrations are shared, shows us there is no right way to be a woman.