The Lost Daughter

Disparities between the real and imagined, the actual and the fabricated, the beautiful and the repellant define the off-kilter atmosphere of The Lost Daughter. Under 200 pages, this work of literary fiction is deceptively simple: A 48-year-old woman decides to spend her summer holiday from university at the beach. However, Elena Ferrante quickly disturbs the utopic possibilities of Leda’s getaway. Gestures at danger, violence, and cruelty pervade Leda’s reality. She’s hit by a pinecone in the woods, unsure if someone is attacking her. She hears strange noises, unsure if she’s being followed. She avoids an older shopkeeper’s eye, unsure if his attentions are kind or sexually invasive. Grown women appear and behave like immature girls, little girls wear grown women’s hats and accessories, and children’s dolls have women’s figures and plastic wombs full of worms. This blurring of boundaries is particularly instructive; if Ferrante’s iconic Neapolitan Series—beginning with My Brilliant Friend—explores the violence of girlhood, The Lost Daughter exposes the violence of motherhood and its childhood origins.

As bliss becomes horrific, Leda’s character grows desperate for revenge against her fellow vacationers—a dynamic that enacts Leda’s regard for herself as a mother and a woman. Ferrante’s stylistic certainty and linguistic control are, like her first-person narrator, rigid and contained on its surface, lulling the reader into deceptive peacefulness, while her exacting imagery and sensory detail distort the parameters of the quotidian. However, Leda’s narration demands that the reader listen, as “the unspoken says more than the spoken” (32).

When Leda begins her vacation on Italy’s southern coast, she’s ready to revel in her solitude. Leda is an intellectual, a mother of two, and a divorcee. She carries herself with dignity and poise but by her own admission is “hiding many dark things, in silence” (100). Her long, hot days reading and writing on the beach feel as freeing as when her daughters, Bianca and Marta, first moved to Toronto to live near their father the year prior. Leda feels “miraculously unfettered”—the difficult job of motherhood no longer weighing her down.

However, Leda’s sprightly physicality and sunlit surroundings lose their luster when a Neapolitan family that reminds her of her own relatives starts spending their days under the umbrellas neighboring her own. Leda is at once drawn to and repulsed by the family. Although frustrated by their familiar antics, she’s also fascinated by the relationship between the young mother, Nina, her daughter, Elena, and Elena’s doll, Nani, and begins to watch them.

The intimacy between Nina, Elena, and Nani quickly becomes angering to Leda. The doll is ugly, half-bald, and overloved. The games Nina and Elena play with her are so exasperating that Leda considers telling them they don’t know how to play. Determined to distinguish herself from the family, Leda vows to ignore them for the rest of the trip, but when Elena goes missing one day, Leda feels powerless not to intervene. Reminded of a time when Bianca disappeared at the beach decades prior, Leda goes in search of and finds Elena. The family is relieved, but Elena is beside herself—she’s lost her precious doll. Leda coolly parts with the family, letting them deal with the sobbing child and tucking the doll she stole deeper into her purse.

What begins as an “almost comic” act becomes the novel’s central mystery and propulsive force. The chapters that follow trace Leda’s intimate interactions with the doll in privacy and her ongoing encounters with the Neapolitan family in public. This incidental proximity to the Neapolitans unavoidably reminds her of her fraught relationship with her mother, her entrapment in her former marriage, and the years she left Bianca and Marta to discover herself alone. Nina, Elena, Rosaria, and Nani are specters of her past selves that haunt her vacation, which is less a retreat from reality and more of a backward voyage into the past. 

True to Ferrante’s now iconic style, very little happens in The Lost Daughter. Leda’s coastal trip isn’t peppered with dramatic sex scenes, acts of violence, or even buoyant conversation. Rather, this slim novel is defined by “parched summer scents,” “swim[s] in transparent water,” and pleasant hours spent in “a gentle mixture of work, daydreams, and idleness” (12, 16).

It’s this very stasis that Leda rebels against when she takes Elena’s doll. Formerly ensnared in her own iteration of motherhood, Leda finds it impossible to enjoy her solitude and ignore the Neapolitans’ abrasive behavior. Taking the doll becomes her greatest attempt at self-reclamation since she left her daughters and husband to discover herself years prior. In stealing it, Leda inserts herself into Nina and Elena’s private union—desperate to make herself indispensable to a story that isn’t her own.

The Lost Daughter is a character-driven novel, which makes this single “plot twist” all the more effective: It disorients the reader and compels them to question the morality and reliability of the character at the novel’s very heart. A writer, intellectual, and teacher, Leda is regarded on her holiday as a respectable, self-possessed woman. “You have such self-confidence,” Nina tells her in Chapter 21, “you’re not afraid of anything” (115). Her first-person narration is similarly cool, largely unaffected, and unwaveringly direct. Even when she’s confused by her own behaviors and actions, her narration belies little of her unrest.

However, Leda’s deadpan tone in fact enacts her determination to uphold the illusion of self she’s curated. Narrative flashbacks reveal that since Leda was young she’s tried to prove that, unlike her mother, she doesn’t need to put on airs because she truly is exceptional. Just as her linguistic deftness is the result of tedious study—she converses in Dutch, German, English, and her native Italian throughout the novel—so too is her meticulous self-expression. Rather than a liberated mother, she is “a girl playing at being a mother” (124). Rather than embodying grace, she has donned it to disguise the rage that inflames her interiority.

Leda is therefore occupying the gap between who she is meant to be and who she wants to be—a struggle Ferrante touches in all of her novels but that here becomes particularly emotionally charged due to its intersection with the ways motherhood can distort a woman’s sense of self, compelling her to inhabit a body, identity, and mode of being unrecognizable to her. Leda’s inability to reconcile culturally prescribed notions of docile maternity with her penchant for anger has consequences. She is compelled to occupy “a division in time” (131), perpetually dancing between alternate iterations of life and self at once.

Her seeming reversion to youth at the novel’s start foreshadows her encounters with former iterations of herself while at the beach. The generations of women in the Neapolitan family she observes each represent Leda in an alternate version of girlhood, womanhood, or motherhood, which is precisely why she comes to detest them: They each expose a version of herself she thought she’d outgrown, surpassed, or eradicated. Ferrante’s integration of the past and the present begets a hazy narrative atmosphere that some readers may find off-puttingly disorienting but that mimics the physiological effects of the sun on Leda’s psyche and immerses the reader in Leda’s unease, causing them to question the truth of who Leda is and what she wants. Indeed, Leda’s deceptively contained account excavates the terror of becoming estranged from oneself and the frightful, violent attempts to reclaim the illusion of identity.