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Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter”

“The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.” With that simple and unnerving sentence on the second page of this astonishingly economic novel, author Elena Ferrante is giving readers fair warning: brace yourselves, painful, discomforting truths are about to be revealed in this book about daughters and mothers and the women struggling to be both.

The revelations of Leda, a middle-aged Neapolitan-born divorced mother of two and professor of English literature, are all the more unsettling for the sun-drenched idyllic setting—an Italian coastal town—in which her shadowy secrets are revealed. This is not the bel paese of modern marketing mythology, the one imagined by innumerable vacationers and perpetuated as some paradiso-on-earth in everything from glossy travel magazines to books/films like Under the Tuscan Sun , a never-neverland where the inhabitants are full of life, family and amore. Like her compatriot, the late Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, who, in his novels and short fiction, never hesitated to reveal the moral shortcomings of the inhabitants of his native island or Italian society at large that so willingly accepts the political corruption that is fatte in Italia (made In Italy) as much as Gucci, Maserati and a good Barolo, Ferrante pulls back the layers of escapist fantasy and exposes all those disturbing shadows hiding underneath that Mediterranean sun.

With her grown daughters now living in Canada with her ex-husband, Leda is finally alone and free to dedicate herself to her work. But instead of the expected loneliness, she feels oddly secure. She escapes Florence, where she lives, and heads for a small coastal town for an extended summer holiday of books, sun and the sea. What could be more peaceful?

But on the beach she soon encounters an extended Neapolitan family, loud, boisterous, speaking the dialect of her youth, a “tender language of playfulness and sweet nothings.” It is also the native tongue of the tribal family that she escaped from. She recalls her father and uncles and how “every question sounded on their lips like an order barely disguised…if necessary they could be vulgarly insulting and violent.” At eighteen, she had gone to Florence to study and never looked back “into the black well I came from.” From adolescence onward, she aspired to “a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective.” She is both repelled and entranced by the family and acknowledges that despite all the distance she has put between herself and the city of her origin, she could slip right back into the emotional terrain the Neapolitans inhabit.

In the beginning, Leda merely observes Nina, a young mother, and her daughter Elena and the beloved doll that is the object of the child's affection. Over the course of a few days, their lives become intertwined. When Elena goes missing, Leda finds her. Leda remembers how she herself was lost as a child and her panic when one of her own daughters was lost. But when Nani, Elena's doll, goes missing the novel reaches its emotional epicenter. Leda, it turns out in a moment redolent with psychological implications, has taken it.

The taking of the doll isn't just a momentary lapse of judgment but one that reverberates with dangerous possibilities. Nina's husband, who bears a large scar across his stomach, and his brusque family are described by Gino, who happens to be Nina's lover, in a seemingly innocuous phrase: “They're bad people.” The coded language implies that the family is Camorra, or the Naples equivalent of Sicily's Mafia; they are, in other words, the kind of people who are short on forgiveness and long on memory, especially when it comes to slights and theft.

The doll is an emotional Rosetta stone, unleashing a flood of memories from Leda's own unhappy childhood, including her mother's endless threats to leave and her unhappy adulthood when, as a young mother herself, she sacrificed her own dreams in order to raise a family. She recounts to Nina how she finally followed through on her mother's empty threats and walked out on her own daughters. “I abandoned them when the older was six and the younger four,” she says as if she was recounting a weather report.

This is Ferrante's devastating power as a novelist: she navigates the emotional minefields and unsparingly tallies the cycle of psychological damage among multiple generations of women in Leda's family in straightforward, almost curt language (credit must also be given to translator Ann Goldstein's subtle rendering); the author uses blunt words that slice like a rapier to describe Leda's scars. “Everything in those years seemed to me without remedy, I myself was without remedy,” she recounts. And: “How many damaged, lost things did I have behind me, and yet present, now…”

Ultimately, the doll is returned, but it is too late for forgiveness, Nina has none in her; just as it is too late for Leda to forgive her mother and family, and too late for her own daughters to forgive her trespasses. In the end, Ferrante reminds us that there is no escaping the damage that comes with familial love, intentional or not. Perhaps the best we can do is to acknowledge the damage that has been wrought, as bravely as Ferrante does in this mesmerizing novel.

Joseph V. Tirella is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times , Portfolio.com , Esquire and Vibe .

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Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter” Is Sluggish, Spotty, and a Major Achievement

By Richard Brody

About a month ago, on my first viewing of “The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of the novel by Elena Ferrante, I was sure that something was missing. Though I’d never read the book, the film left me with no doubt that the novel had been written as a first-person narrative, filled with the protagonist’s memories, perceptions, ideas, and directly voiced emotions. That impression, borne out in point of fact, highlights the essential failure of this nonetheless accomplished film—the reduction of a literary source to the framework of a plot. What’s more, this replacement of reflective voice with dramatic depiction reduces the emotion, the psychology, and the intellectual power of the story. It leaves the movie feeling simultaneously too short and too long, a slender tale drawn out at extended length and a vast one crammed into a two-hour span with undue brevity and haste.

The movie (which is streaming on Netflix) starts at night, with a woman in white (Olivia Colman) shuffling along a beach and collapsing on the shore. The rest of the film flashes back from that vague catastrophe. The woman is Leda Caruso, a forty-eight-year-old literature professor from Cambridge, Massachusetts. For a stretch of the summer, she rents a floor at a beach house on the fictional Greek island of Kyopeli, where she plans to use the isolation to get some work done. She parks herself on a chaise longue at seaside, pulls out a book (Dante’s Paradiso), scribbles in her notebook (nothing onscreen long enough to read), and asks a friendly young attendant—an Irish business student of twenty-four named Will (Paul Mescal)—for an ice-cream pop. But the arrival of a big, noisy Greek American family from Queens, with many boisterous young men and active little children, becomes a distraction. There’s an ambient, latent violence to the men’s presence, an intrinsic aggression to the loud-voiced women, and Leda soon comes into conflict with the large clan—but it’s amicably smoothed over by the young matriarch Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who apologizes and befriends Leda. The professor’s connection to the family tightens when a toddler in the group—a girl whose mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), is Callie’s younger sister-in-law—gets lost and Leda, joining the search, finds her.

The strongest effect that the family has on Leda is mnemonic: seeing young mothers with young daughters sparks remembrances of her own earlier years, nearly two decades ago, when her two daughters (now in their twenties) were small children. Extensive flashbacks punctuating much of the film show what her life was like then, as the younger Leda (Jessie Buckley) attempted to cope with the demands of raising children while advancing her academic career; her husband, Joe (Jack Farthing), also an academic, faced similar demands but shunted them onto Leda. In her frustration, Leda left the family, divorced her husband, and didn’t see the children for three years. Now, with the large and lusty family in full view, her attention and memories fix on a single detail: the lost girl is fiercely attached to a doll, as one of Leda’s young daughters was, and as Leda herself was. Leda, seeing the doll abandoned on the beach, steals and hides it, turning it into a sort of fetish—bathing it, dressing it, cuddling with it.

These elements all provide harrowing, fascinating, and moving objects of consciousness without the consciousness that holds them together. The movie’s distillation of subjective memory and elaborate reflection into images is suggested without being achieved, because the directorial strategy holding the drama together is vague and diffuse. Leda’s perspective is conjured in point-of-view shots that evoke perception and immediate emotion: images of the men roughhousing in the sea, of the women tightly enmeshed in the tumult of family lives, and of the lost girl alone in a rocky nook all appear redolent not of a mere detailing of facts but of Leda’s varied responses to the events, to the characters. These instant, volatile responses, however, remain unanchored—they are both dramatically and psychologically insubstantial—and that’s as much a function of Gyllenhaal’s direction as of her screenwriting.

The movie offers an urgent sense of proximity, starting with intense (yet unimaginatively composed) closeups of Leda. (The cinematography is by Hélène Louvart, who has shot such remarkable films as “ Just Anybody ,” “ Beach Rats ,” “ Never Rarely Sometimes Always ,” and “ Happy as Lazzaro .”) But many scenes are composed merely to illustrate events and offer little sense of physical presence and action—even in scenes of crucial physicality, as when Leda takes and hides the doll, an event that the movie leaves ambiguous, as if the decisive moment risked either absurdity or villainy. The artifice of that object’s prominence, and that theft’s centrality to the character of Leda and to the plot, cries out for reality at both ends—physically, with a straightforward and detailed view, as in a crime drama, and psychologically, with reference to the layers of Leda’s experience, memory, and emotion. Instead, the visual and dramatic approximations create a symbol signifying little but the cinematic concept of the literary.

There’s a very strange moment that suggests how drastically Gyllenhaal truncates the character of Leda. When, in one of the flashbacks, the younger Leda tells Joe that she’s leaving, he threatens to consign the children to their grandmother, Leda’s mother. Leda reacts with panic, declaring her childhood a “black shithole,” and also with terror and contempt, reminding Joe that her mother never finished school. In the movie, the remark comes off as obliviously classist—there’s no shortage of loving, smart, and wise people with little formal education—and seems weirdly inconsistent with the portrait of Leda’s temperament that the movie constructs. (Another unconsidered matter of the peculiarities of class is that the Greek Americans may out-money Leda—they rent a grand villa whereas she rents a modest flat—but her conspicuous intellectual refinement is her social capital.) I was simply bewildered by Leda’s hard words about her mother until I learned that, in Ferrante’s novel, the character of Leda is from Naples, that the family on the beach is also Neapolitan and implicitly of the criminal underworld, that Leda fled the harshness of her family and her city’s milieu for her studies and her career, and that the appearance of the family on the beach was no mere general menace of aggression and view of maternity but a specific recollection of the terrors of her own childhood.

In detaching Leda (who says that her family origins are in the English town of Shipley) by ethnicity and experience from the cultural and regional specifics of the perturbing beach family, Gyllenhaal reduces the character and the drama drastically—and, above all, thins out the power of the present-day seaside scenes. The overwhelming impact of seeing, on the beach, the virtual return of one’s own dreadful past is replaced by a generic dismay at the beach family’s aggressive clamor. The film centers the drama of Leda’s current, encumbered solitude on the stresses of her life as a young mother and her leap into independence by separating herself from her children. The movie puts significant dramatic weight on Leda’s relationships with the younger women in the rowdy family: to Callie, who’s forty-two and pregnant with her first child, Leda offers a bracingly candid view of the difficulties of motherhood as a “crushing responsibility.” Her bond with Nina revolves around the doll, until other dramatic complications come to the fore, late in the action. Leda’s relationship with Will (for whom she appears to harbor glimmers of sexual or romantic interest) and with her elderly landlord, Lyle (Ed Harris), who awkwardly flirts with her, are mere teases regarding her states of mind, her desires, her present life. Yet these thinly sketched relationships, seemingly tied to the determining events of the past, become major plot points that suggest the mechanics of script construction instead of dramatic necessity.

Gyllenhaal places the most emotional weight on the story of the young professor and rising scholar whose ambitions are at risk of being thwarted by the demands of motherhood. The present-day story framing it is weakened by the transformation of a novel into the bare bones of a plot that tosses aside the voice, the mental activity, that energizes it. There’s a more audacious adaptation struggling to escape from this one—a movie that would develop those scenes at length, turning the drama of Leda as a young mother into something more than a handful of bluntly causal tethers, and would center the voice that gives the present tense life. Instead, the movie of “The Lost Daughter” falls in-between and does justice to neither period in Leda’s life, nor to the character over all.

Its dramatic shortcuts notwithstanding, “The Lost Daughter” is a major achievement, because it is, in its very essence, a sort of meta-movie: it embodies and signifies a kind of film that is itself lamentably rare. It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience. The crucial subject of “The Lost Daughter” is the woeful fact that it’s exceptional, that there is no Elena Ferrante of filmmaking. Whatever the conventions and shortcuts of literary adaptation that the movie reflects, Gyllenhaal has thrown down a gauntlet to filmmakers and producers, to the movie industry at large, and to the future of the art.

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THE LOST DAUGHTER

by Elena Ferrante & translated by Ann Goldstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2008

Does little to illuminate a familiar conflict.

In this latest from the pseudonymous Italian Ferrante ( Troubling Love , 2006, etc.), a middle-aged woman spends her summer vacation meditating about motherhood.

Leda was born and raised in Naples, but she didn’t feel happy until she escaped at 18 to study in Florence. For her, Florence is a symbol of culture and refinement, while Naples is loud and crude. Now 47, Leda is a university teacher in Florence, long separated from her husband Gianni, another academic, who emigrated to Toronto; her grown daughters, Bianca and Marta, recently joined him, but they stay in close phone contact with their mother. Leda’s summer rental is near the sea in an unspecified town. On the beach she observes an attractive threesome: A young mother (Nina), her small daughter (Elena) and the girl’s doll, with which the pair play. They are part of a larger group of Neapolitans who are sprawled out on the beach. When Elena disappears, Leda finds her and returns her to her grateful mother, but then steals her doll. What’s the reason for this “opaque action”? Does she want to forge a connection to the family, or tap into her own childhood memories? It’s a puzzle; not an interesting one, but there it sits, an indigestible lump. Far more interesting is Leda’s confession, to these total strangers, that she once abandoned her daughters for three years, leaving them with her overworked husband. What triggered her departure was a London academic conference where she was lionized by a professor, who would become her lover, and felt an intoxicating sense of self. Eventually she realized being a mother was her most significant fulfillment. Freedom versus responsibility: This tension underlies Leda’s behavior and ambivalence toward her daughters, which continues to the present. The young mother Nina is Leda’s sounding-board, but Ferrante fails to integrate Leda’s soul-searching with the problems of the fractious Neapolitan family on the beach.

Pub Date: April 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-933372-42-6

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Elena Ferrante ; translated by Ann Goldstein

by Elena Ferrante translated by Ann Goldstein

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

SEEN & HEARD

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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The Best Fiction Books » Contemporary Fiction

The lost daughter, by elena ferrante, translated by ann goldstein, recommendations from our site.

“Ferrante gets at something profoundly true about parenthood, that it is both a glorious and a torturous bond. One feels a natural resentment about the demands children place on you—a desire to run away from them and live unencumbered by responsibility—yet also a desire never to be separate from them.” Read more...

The Best Metaphysical Thrillers

Greg Jackson , Novelist

“ The Lost Daughter tells the story of a 50-year-old literature professor named Leda who takes herself on a melancholy beach vacation, where she sees a mother and daughter playing together on the beach. Leda’s own daughters are grown, and she’s struck, instantaneously and illogically, with a kind of jealous attraction to the connection between this mother and daughter. The little girl leaves her doll on the beach, and Leda takes the doll, and watches the child suffer its loss, watches the whole family frantically search for the doll on the beach…..it reminds you that belonging is never an easy thing. Belonging has terrible consequences.” Read more...

The Best Elena Ferrante Books

Other books by Ann Goldstein and Elena Ferrante

The lying life of adults: a novel by elena ferrante, frantumaglia: a writer's journey by elena ferrante, the beach at night by elena ferrante, the days of abandonment by elena ferrante, my brilliant friend: the neapolitan quartet by elena ferrante, our most recommended books, the road by cormac mccarthy, riddley walker by russell hoban, underworld by don delillo, blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, the shining by stephen king, the diaries of dawn powell: 1931-1965 by dawn powell.

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Review: ‘The Lost Daughter’ is quintessential Maggie Gyllenhaal, even though she’s never on screen

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

It always speaks well of actors’ humility when they make their directorial debut with a film in which they do not star. It speaks well of their gifts, however, when you sense their screen presence in the film anyway: a strength and specificity of personality that survives their absence and colors other actors’ performances. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes just such a debut with her slippery, sinuous, subtly electrifying Elena Ferrante adaptation “The Lost Daughter”: She’s never made a film before, and yet you’d already feel comfortable classifying it as “a Gyllenhaal film,” the way you might name-brand Joanna Hogg or François Ozon — to name two other directors briefly (though not derivatively) reflected in this film’s glinting, angular surfaces.

Gyllenhaal’s restraint in staying off-screen is all the more notable given that Leda, the thorny, inconstant heroine of Ferrante’s 2006 novel, is exactly the kind of character with which she typically excels as an actor. From the sadomasochistic office assistant of “Secretary” to the recovering train wreck of “Sherrybaby” to the obsessive classroom Svengali of “The Kindergarten Teacher,” she specializes in women others might call “difficult,” with inscrutable desires and ill-fitting social graces. Sure enough, that sympathy for difficulty surfaces here in all manner of ways.

Gyllenhaal might well have been superb as Leda, a 40-something literature professor vacationing alone on a balmy Greek island yet unable to find psychological peace. Still, it’s hard to imagine she’d have been better than an extraordinary Olivia Colman, who wears the role as naturally and unfussily as the oversize white linen blouse that is Leda’s default beachwear, reveling in the chance to play a “normal” female protagonist after the stiff, stylized work of playing various queens to Oscar- and Emmy-winning effect.

Note those scare quotes, for there’s nothing especially normal about Leda, a woman who tartly rejects any prescriptive model of what a woman should be. The more time we spend with her, the more complications we see in her reserved, polite, slightly skittish demeanor: a first impression that wouldn’t draw a second glance from most people, in large part because middle-aged women are so scantly studied by society at all. Colman, a born character actor who seems as surprised as anyone that she’s become a headlining star in her 40s, plays her with the wary knowledge of what it’s like not to be looked at, to keep largely secret one’s eccentricities and flashes of brilliance.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is a natural-born director. Netflix gives her the spotlight

With her directorial debut “The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal is ready for the awards season frenzy. But this time she’s staying behind the camera.

Sept. 14, 2021

Leda’s on her best behavior when she arrives at the pebbly island, projecting an air of mummy affability to Lyle (Ed Harris), the awkwardly flirtatious proprietor of the apartment she’s renting, and Will (Paul Mescal), the young, dreamy resort manager she admires from a slightly sheepish distance. But her spinier attributes emerge when her idyll is crashed by a rowdy extended family of holidaymakers with various squealing children in tow. Her initial hostility toward them is met in kind by queen bee Callie (a revelatory Dagmara Domińczyk), though she grows increasingly fixated on Nina (Dakota Johnson), a young mother who never seems entirely at home in the role. Bleary and sporadically detached from her cherubic daughter, she has more of a kindred spirit in Leda than she realizes.

For Leda, we gradually learn, is what she herself terms an “unnatural mother”: She mentions her two adult daughters when asked, and speaks good-naturedly to them on the phone from time to time, yet long stretches go by when they don’t seem to be on her mind at all. The film’s title is just its first feat of clever wrong-footing in this regard, as an increasingly intricate flashback structure — like the continuous, spiraling skin of the oranges she peeled for her daughters as girls, her one maternal party trick — fills us in on Leda’s history of discomfort and disassociation as a mother.

The younger Leda is remarkably played by Jessie Buckley with flinty defiance and an escalating sense of suffocated mania. If she and Colman resemble each other no more than any two women pulled off the sidewalk, that works slyly to the film’s advantage, as if the exhaustion and trauma of Leda’s youth has yielded an entirely new face. Yet the physical and gestural mirroring between the two actors is quite astonishing: Often, Colman’s distinctive expressions emerge as uncanny flashes and flinches in Buckley’s visage, like a ghost of motherhood future. These are performances that feel duly steered by a director with an empathetic understanding of unusual women and unusual actors alike; Gyllenhaal’s cinematographer, the great and prolific Helene Louvart, jaggedly zeroes in on faces and features with equivalent empathy and fascination.

For a film that contains no explicit violence or violations, “The Lost Daughter” nonetheless feels quiveringly, exhilaratingly close to something taboo. It’s a rare film that dares to question the supposedly inviolable value of motherhood — a phenomenon typically held up as so sacred that any women who don’t feel attuned to it are encouraged to doubt themselves. It’s not at all surprising that Gyllenhaal has arrived as a filmmaker with such a bold, conflicted paean to unorthodox femininity. But it’s thrilling just the same.

'The Lost Daughter'

Rating: R, for sexual content/nudity and language Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes Playing: In general release Dec. 17; streaming on Netflix Dec. 31

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The Lost Daughter review — Olivia Colman shines in a fierce Ferrante adaptation

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★★★★☆ The actress and first-time feature director Maggie Gyllenhaal expertly harnesses the sublime powers of Olivia Colman for this unsettling Elena Ferrante adaptation about motherhood, desire and the inevitable return of repressed guilt. Colman, an Oscar-winner and multiple Bafta-winner, has nonetheless rarely been better than she is here, as Leeds-born language professor Leda Caruso, introduced on a remote Greek island (filming location: Spetses) as a brittle holidaymaker who is by turns eccentric, aloof, vulnerable and ever so slightly unhinged — during my first viewing of the film (I’ve watched it three times, and read the book) I suspected that she was a serial killer.

Leda is running from her past, indeed, but from something more mundane, yet somehow more corrosive to her soul — a

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‘The Lost Daughter’ Review: Gyllenhaal’s Take on Ferrante’s Novel Is So Electric It Feels Born a Movie

Jessica kiang.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Venice   Film Festival. Netflix will release it in theaters on Friday, December 17, and streaming on Netflix on Friday, December 31.

When Olivia Colman ‘s Leda stumbles and collapses onto the pebbly sand of a twilit Greek beach in the very opening scene of Maggie Gyllenhaal ‘s uncannily accomplished, indefinably disturbing and deeply affecting directorial debut “ The Lost Daughter ,” she is wearing white. This is not unusual for Leda, nor heavily symbolic; it’s a blouse and skirt, not a wedding dress or a shroud. But as the title appears boldly over her prone form, and Dickon Hinchliffe’s melodic, throwback score first plinks out like the never-resolving piano intro to an old pop song, and if you know your Yeats, there’s a chance you might think of some lines of his which talk about a staggering girl and then go “And how can body, laid in that white rush/But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?”

Yeats’ poem, “Leda and the Swan” — from which we later learn that comparative literature professor Leda got her name — is a retelling of the Greek myth of the rape of the Spartan Queen by Zeus who appeared to her in the guise of a swan. “The Lost Daughter,” based on one of Elena Ferrante’s lesser-known books and so electrically adapted for the screen by Gyllenhaal that it feels like it was born a movie, has almost nothing to do with that story, except perhaps for the way it is a tale of violation clad in language so sensual and peculiar that the telling of it becomes a thing of beauty itself. Gyllenhaal’s film is a story of self-ascribed transgression and of shame buried and turned bitterly inward, and it too, is made with such alertness to the power of cinematic language – particularly that of performance –  that even as you feel your stomach slowly drop at the implications of what you’re watching, you cannot break its spreading sinister spell.

The performance in question, it will surprise no one who’s been to the movies in the last five years to hear, is given by Olivia Colman, on whom so many superlatives have already been rightly showered that it’s genuinely hard to think of one that doesn’t sound like a cliché. But her Leda is something quite extraordinary even within her already extraordinary catalogue: it’s difficult to imagine that anyone else would be able to take this impossible role, in all its unlikeliness and unlikeability, in all its witchy unpredictability and completely staid normalcy and make it seem not only plausible but more real for all its contradictions. Leda, a 48-year-old mother of two daughters (Bianca is 25 and Martha is 23, as she constantly telling her new acquaintances), is outwardly the very model of ordinary, respectable, perhaps slightly invisible middle-aged womanhood. She has come on holiday alone but for some work, to this secluded place, which is shot by the brilliant Hélène Louvart in gently jittery handheld, so that its prettiness is merely incidental and its coolness despite the hot sun feels palpable. And for the time being at least, Leda is enjoying her indulgent solitude like a mid-morning Cornetto.

So it’s with the entirely relatable annoyance of anyone who’s ever found a quiet spot on a nice beach only to have a crowd of rowdy kids settle in right next to them, that Leda reacts when her little oasis of calm is invaded. The first voice she hears is that of Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), the pregnant, strident scion of a dubiously wealthy Queens family who summer here every year in a rented pink villa on the outskirts of their ancestral village. But the first person she really notices is Callie’s sister-in-law, the gorgeous, lissome Nina ( Dakota Johnson ), as she nuzzles her daughter Elena and plays with her in the sparkling surf. Already there is something a little off – too rapt, too attentive – in the way Leda observes Nina. It’s a strange connection that cues the revelation of other weird undercurrents that eddy beneath Leda’s placid surface: her dizzy spells, her sudden stubbornnesses, her cold-then-hot-then-cold reaction to the faint but unmistakable advances made on her by Lyle (Ed Harris) her holiday home’s caretaker, and the friendly flirtations of Will (Paul Mescal) the young student working his summer at the beach bar.

Nina and Leda finally talk after Elena, the first of many lost daughters in “The Lost Daughter” goes missing and Leda finds her. We’ve already had the beginnings of Leda’s larger story in a few flashbacks to the time when her daughters were around Elena’s age and when she herself was Jessie Buckley – who despite a physical dissimilarity that Gyllenhaal makes no crass attempt to hide, has a such a synergy of body language and mannerism with Colman, that their performances became one palimpsest, the lines of one showing faintly through onto the other: Buckley an echo of the past for Colman; Colman a ghost of the future for Buckley. These scenes start off as memories of her closeness to her kids but soon morph into more painful reminiscences about all the times she resented them, especially little Bianca, for demanding more of her than she wanted to give. In one such, in a sequence that would be heavy-handed if Gyllenhaal’s touch wasn’t so assured, Buckley’s Leda reacts angrily when Bianca defaces Leda’s own favorite childhood doll. Seldom has the inherent creepiness of giving little girls miniaturized baby-shaped mannequins on which to mimic motherhood been so evocatively mined as it is here.

But even after some fraught flashbacking has introduced notes of unease, Leda could still be just what she seems to Nina: a not especially interesting but useful ally who sympathizes with Nina’s own frustrations with her kid and her controlling family. But then Leda does an inexplicably perverse thing. Having returned Elena to her family, she steals the doll she earlier saw the little girl bite down on savagely, in response to a fight between her tempestuous parents. This tiny, deeply conflicted act – one that we’re never even sure that Leda herself understands – is the pebble in the shoe, the grit in the eye, the bug on the pillow of the rest of the film, unlocking levels of Leda’s fathomless psychology that are dark and troubling and horribly, awfully recognizable.

In every mother a sliver of ambivalence about motherhood; in every pretty doll’s mouth a worm. “How did it feel, to be away from your daughters?” asks Nina, expecting a reply full of angst and regret. The regret is there but the reply that comes – “It felt amazing,” says Leda – is the more honest because it is so unexpected. This is how Gyllenhaal has, with a blazing certainty that seems borderline miraculous in a first-time filmmaker, engineered “The Lost Daughter” to work, so that even though very little actually happens, the way that things don’t happen is somehow an ongoing, gripping surprise. The tension is born of an uncertainty, in any given situation, over how Leda, so unforgettably embodied by Colman, will behave. The suspense is that of an orange being peeled in a long strip that seems like it must break at any moment. And it will surely strike the rawest of nerves in anyone – mother or not – who staggers through the world with the demeanor of an ordinary decent person, when all the while feeling the thump inside of her strange heart beating where it lies.

“The Lost Daughter” premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. Netflix will release it in theaters on Friday, December 17, and then on Netflix on December 31.

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Review: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘Lost Daughter’ is a stunner

This image released by Netflix shows Jessie Buckley in a scene from “The Lost Daughter.” (Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Ed Harris, left, and Olivia Colman in a scene from “The Lost Daughter.” (Yannis Drakoulidis/Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Olivia Colman in a scene from “The Lost Daughter.” (Netflix via AP)

This image released by Netflix shows Dakota Johnson in a scene from “The Lost Daughter.” (Netflix via AP)

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Motherhood. It’s such a rich subject for art to ponder, you’d think we’d have already seen every kind of mother onscreen.

But actually we haven’t. Sure, we’ve seen good moms, bad moms, crazy moms, selfish moms, generous moms, loving moms, cold moms. But what strikes home so vividly in “The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gorgeous directorial debut, is how rarely we see a mother who is all those things at once. And yet honestly, what could be more real than that?

On my first viewing of Gyllenhaal’s film, adapted from an Elena Ferrante novel, I was preoccupied with Olivia Colman in yet another blazing performance (is there anything Colman can’t do?), a veritable onion shedding layers as she plays Leda, a prickly yet exceedingly vulnerable 48-year-old academic.

But there’s another facet to this film that makes it a rarity. On second viewing, what transfixed me was the synergy between older Leda and younger Leda, played by Jessie Buckley as a mother on the cusp of 30. Gyllenhaal interweaves their stories with a deft touch that deepens the connection as the film progresses, to the point where nary a doubt remains that they’re the same person. Do they look alike? Outwardly no, I guess, but there’s an inner connection that’s astonishing (the two actors never meet, of course). The casting choice – it was Colman who suggested Buckley – is simply inspired.

We meet Colman’s Leda as she arrives on an idyllic Greek island for a “working holiday,” laden with books. A British professor of comparative literature who teaches “in Cambridge, near Boston” (wink wink), Colman’s Leda settles into a rental apartment a short walk through the woods to the sea. She seems content — triumphant, even — the next day as she nestles in her beach chair with an ice cream cone and her notebooks.

Then the family arrives — a boisterous extended clan from Queens in New York, who noisily disturb her peaceful isolation, even asking her to move to another part of the beach (she says no.) But Leda is fascinated by the quiet one, Nina, a beautiful young mother (Dakota Johnson) whose domineering husband spends weekdays off the island. She can’t seem to keep her eyes off Nina and the young daughter, who demands her exhausted mom’s constant attention. In fact, Leda immediately starts to cry.

When, one day, the little girl goes missing for a bit, it’s Leda who manages to find her, earning gratitude from the frantic Nina. But the youngster has lost her prized doll, and she’s inconsolable for days on end.

Meanwhile, the onion is peeling — we’re learning more about Leda, a mother of two adult daughters. As she gradually reveals details to Will (Paul Mescal), the strapping young Irishman who works at the beach house, or to Lyle (Ed Harris), the American caretaker of her apartment, or to Nina, Gyllenhaal toggles these scenes with those from decades earlier, when Leda — now Buckley — was a young mom balancing work with parenting. Although her husband, also an academic, clearly loves the girls, it’s his work — as in so many families — that takes precedence at tough moments.

The scenes with Buckley (as splendid as Colman) and her daughters are heartbreaking, especially to any mother who’s tried unsuccessfully to find the balance between children and the work that makes her whole. Her Leda can go from deeply loving — collapsing to the floor in giggles with her girls — to terribly cruel, as when she (excruciatingly!) refuses to kiss the cut finger of her crying daughter. And yet she’s so passionate — about life, and about work — that we can’t help but sympathize with her.

Then there’s Nina (an excellent Johnson doing some of her best work to date), whose troubled motherhood becomes a mirror for older Leda. Colman’s most dramatic moments, which combine an aching vulnerability with a distasteful brittleness, come in two scenes with Johnson. In one, Leda makes a heart-shattering confession about her past. In the other, she cops to an inexplicable transgression in the present.

With lead performances like these, it’s easy to forget the noteworthy work in supporting roles. Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, is effective as a sexy academic who pursues young Leda, and Mescal is hugely charismatic as Will. Harris is a grizzled, grounded presence as the caretaker who tries to get closer to Leda. Jack Farthing as her husband and Dagmara Dominczyk as a motherly figure in Nina’s family also make an impression.

“I’m an unnatural mother,” Colman’s Leda says at one pivotal point. Her face is contorted in guilt (or is it grief?) at the circumstances that have brought her to that moment.

But it seems that she, and Gyllenhaal, are telling us something more: Perhaps there is no such thing as a “natural” mother. Perhaps there’s something in this tale of two women — or really, three — that speaks to all who try to pretend that it’s unnatural to sometimes be ambivalent about motherhood. And that motherhood is not, in ways and at times, a struggle for nearly everyone.

“The Lost Daughter,” a Netflix release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America “for sexual content/nudity and language.” Running time: 122 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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The Lost Daughter: A Novel Paperback – Feb. 11 2022

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NOW A MOTION PICTURE NOMINATED FOR THREE OSCARS—Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay—Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Jesse Buckley, Paul Mescal, and Dakota Johnson Another penetrating Neapolitan story from New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family in this “arresting” novel by the author of the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which have sold millions of copies and been adapted into an HBO series (Publishers Weekly). “Although much of the drama takes place in [Leda’s] head, Ferrante’s gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral.”—The New Yorker “Ferrante’s prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret.”—Publishers Weekly

• Print length 144 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Europa Editions
• Publication date Feb. 11 2022
• Dimensions 13.34 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm
• ISBN-10 1609457692
• ISBN-13 978-1609457693
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Praise for The Lost Daughter"Elena Ferrante will blow you away."—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones"Ferrante can do a woman's interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt."—Booklist

"Ferrante has blown the lid off tempestuous parent-child relations."—The Seattle Times

"So refined, almost translucent, that it seems about to float away. In the end this piercing novel is not so easily dislodged from the memory."—The Boston Globe

"Ferrante's prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret."—Publishers Weekly

"The Lost Daughter is a resounding success...It is delicate yet daring, precise yet evanescent: it hurts like a cut, and cures like balm."—La Repubblica"The Lost Daughter is a novel about the female condition: the conflicts that can emerge in the sphere of marriage, the extinction of love and passion, the difficult relationships with children, which both obstruct and assist the free expression of one's feelings and the growth towards maturity.”—La Stampa Praise for Elena Ferrante“Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe her boldest creative gesture.”—David Kurnick, Public Books “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.”—Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe “Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing.”—Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal “Ferrante has become Italy’s best known writer. In our era of social media accessibility, shameless self-promotion, and hot young celebrity culture, this is nothing short of astounding.”—Gina Frangello, Electric Literature “Ferrante’s writing seems to say something that hasn’t been said before—it isn’t easy to specify what this is—in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep.”—Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books “To disagree over the quality of a Ferrante passage is often to run up against what you cannot answer or digest.”—Jedediah Purdy, The Los Angeles Review of Books

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Europa Editions (Feb. 11 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609457692
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609457693
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 159 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.34 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm
• #5,914 in Domestic Life in Women's Fiction
• #24,131 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Elena ferrante.

Elena Ferrante is the author of seven novels, including four New York Times bestsellers; The Beach at Night, an illustrated book for children; and, Frantumaglia, a collection of letters, literary essays, and interviews. Her fiction has been translated into over forty languages and been shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. In 2016 she was named one of TIME’s most influential people of the year and the New York Times has described her as “one of the great novelists of our time.” Ferrante was born in Naples.

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By the Book

Judi Dench’s Eyesight Keeps Her From Reading, but Not From Books

“They’re snapshots of the past: first-night gifts, holidays abroad, memories of lost friends and loved ones,” the award-winning actress says. Her latest, written with Brendan O’Hea, is “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.”

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What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

That’s an impossible question. The best in 89 years? How do I know? I remember being given A.P. Wavell’s “Other Men’s Flowers” as a birthday present when I was young. It’s a collection of poetry, which opened my eyes to the power of verse. But then I also adored “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” by Patricia Highsmith . My husband, Michael [Williams], bought it for me as a holiday read. I devoured it and didn’t want it to end. I had to ration myself to a couple of pages a day.

What’s the last great book you read?

“ Dormouse Has a Cold,” by Julia Donaldson . It’s a lift-the-flap children’s book, sent to me when I was recovering from a cold.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

After lights out at boarding school when I was 15. I was in bed under the covers with a torch reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

How do you organize your books?

I don’t. I have so many books, but never enough shelves, so I have books everywhere — piled up on tables, chairs, running along window sills, books in every available nook and cranny. Because of my eyesight I can no longer read, but I love being surrounded by books — they’re snapshots of the past: first-night gifts, holidays abroad, memories of lost friends and loved ones. I still have my father’s individual copies of the Temple Shakespeare from 1903. They’re small, red-leather-bound copies with gilt lettering on the cover, and if I hold one I can be transported back to my childhood and family quizzes about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s writing, you say in the new book, “has the capacity to make us feel less alone.” What other writing has done that for you?

Oh so many — Iris Murdoch, Chekhov, Zoë Heller, J.D. Salinger — any writer who can reflect us back to ourselves and help us discover who we are.

You mention seeing a theater ghost in the book. Do you enjoy ghost stories?

I love a good ghost story. I remember being on a family camping holiday in Scotland when my daughter, Finty, was young. We snuggled up under a blanket, while Michael poured himself a large vodka and tonic and read us “The Mezzotint,” by M.R. James. It was thrilling.

Did you ever read backstage to pass the time?

No, there’s never time. And in any case I couldn’t, as I’d be worried about becoming too engrossed in the story and missing my cue.

What book, fiction or nonfiction, best captures life and work in the theater?

Again, there are so many, but I’ll opt for “National Service,” by Richard Eyre. It’s such an honest account of the ups and downs of running a big organization like the National Theater.

What made Brendan O’Hea a good interviewer for this book?

We’re old friends and have no secrets from each other. We also have the same sense of humor and a shared passion for Shakespeare. He’s tenacious in his questioning, which probably means that I’ve revealed more about my personal life and acting technique in this book than I have in any other .

Does the Shakespeare authorship debate interest you?

No. William Shakespeare from Stratford is good enough for me and I’ll settle for that.

Of all the characters you’ve played across different media, which role felt to you the most fulfilling?

I’d have to say Cleopatra: She’s mercurial, witty, imperious, passionate, irreverent — the whole of life is in that part — you get a real intellectual workout whilst playing her. In fact, I’d like to be getting ready now to go onstage to play her — look, I’m getting goose bumps at the thought.

If an aspiring actor were to read one portion of the book, which would you suggest, and why?

I’d hope there was something to be gleaned from every chapter, but there’s advice on the rehearsal process, coping with first-night nerves and tips on verse speaking. I’m just sharing a little of what I’ve learned over the past 70 years, which will hopefully act as a springboard for aspiring actors to formulate their own ideas. I’d also like to say that we’ve had wonderful feedback from people who aren’t actors — many of whom were put off Shakespeare at school — and, having read our book, felt inspired to revisit his plays.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I’m not a very good cook, so I may have to suggest that people eat before they arrive. I’d certainly invite Shakespeare. I’d ask him if he had another play up his doublet. I’d also like to meet Henrik Ibsen — who I recently discovered I’m related to — although he might scowl if I served him my own version of Norwegian meatballs. And I know Billy Connolly has written a few books, so I’d have to invite him to be assured of a good laugh.

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The Lost Daughter: A Novel Paperback – February 1, 2022

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NOW A MOTION PICTURE NOMINATED FOR THREE OSCARS—Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay—Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Jesse Buckley, Paul Mescal, and Dakota Johnson Another penetrating Neapolitan story from New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend  and  The Lying Life of Adults Leda, a middle-aged divorcée, is alone for the first time in years after her two adult daughters leave home to live with their father in Toronto. Enjoying an unexpected sense of liberty, she heads to the Ionian coast for a vacation. But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family in this “arresting” novel by the author of the New York Times –bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which have sold millions of copies and been adapted into an HBO series ( Publishers Weekly ). “Although much of the drama takes place in [Leda’s] head, Ferrante’s gift for psychological horror renders it immediate and visceral.” — The New Yorker “Ferrante’s prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret.” — Publishers Weekly

• Print length 144 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Europa Editions
• Publication date February 1, 2022
• Dimensions 5.25 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1609457692
• ISBN-13 978-1609457693
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Lost Daughter "Elena Ferrante will blow you away."— Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones "Ferrante can do a woman's interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt." — Booklist

"Ferrante has blown the lid off tempestuous parent-child relations."— The Seattle Times

"So refined, almost translucent, that it seems about to float away. In the end this piercing novel is not so easily dislodged from the memory."— The Boston Globe

"Ferrante's prose is stunningly candid, direct and unforgettable. From simple elements, she builds a powerful tale of hope and regret."— Publishers Weekly

" The Lost Daughter is a resounding success...It is delicate yet daring, precise yet evanescent: it hurts like a cut, and cures like balm." — La Repubblica " The Lost Daughter is a novel about the female condition: the conflicts that can emerge in the sphere of marriage, the extinction of love and passion, the difficult relationships with children, which both obstruct and assist the free expression of one's feelings and the growth towards maturity.” — La Stampa Praise for Elena Ferrante “Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe her boldest creative gesture.”— David Kurnick, Public Books “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.”— Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe “Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing.”— Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal “Ferrante has become Italy’s best known writer. In our era of social media accessibility, shameless self-promotion, and hot young celebrity culture, this is nothing short of astounding.”— Gina Frangello, Electric Literature “Ferrante’s writing seems to say something that hasn’t been said before—it isn’t easy to specify what this is—in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep.”— Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books “To disagree over the quality of a Ferrante passage is often to run up against what you cannot answer or digest.”— Jedediah Purdy, The Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

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 Paul Mescal. 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 quartet” ( 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. Ferrante’s most recent novel, the New York Times bestselling The Lying Life of Adults , was published in 2020 by Europa Editions.

Ann Goldstein has translated all of Elena Ferrante’s books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Lying Life of Adults , and the international bestseller, My Brilliant Friend . She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Europa Editions (February 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609457692
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609457693
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.5 x 8.25 inches
• #4,625 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #5,438 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #14,345 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Elena ferrante.

Elena Ferrante is the author of seven novels, including four New York Times bestsellers; The Beach at Night, an illustrated book for children; and, Frantumaglia, a collection of letters, literary essays, and interviews. Her fiction has been translated into over forty languages and been shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. In 2016 she was named one of TIME’s most influential people of the year and the New York Times has described her as “one of the great novelists of our time.” Ferrante was born in Naples.

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The Lost Daughter : Book summary and reviews of The Lost Daughter by Gill Paul

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The Lost Daughter

by Gill Paul

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Published Aug 2019 496 pages Genre: Historical Fiction Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

If you loved I Am Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon you won't want to miss this novel about her sister, Grand Duchess Maria. What really happened to this lost Romanov daughter? A new novel perfect for anyone curious about Anastasia, Maria, and the other lost Romanov daughters, by the author of The Secret Wife .

1918 : Pretty, vivacious Grand Duchess Maria Romanov, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the fallen Tsar Nicholas II, lives with her family in suffocating isolation, a far cry from their once-glittering royal household. Her days are a combination of endless boredom and paralyzing fear; her only respite are clandestine flirtations with a few of the guards imprisoning the family—never realizing her innocent actions could mean the difference between life and death 1973 : When Val Doyle hears her father's end-of-life confession, "I didn't want to kill her," she's stunned. So, she begins a search for the truth—about his words and her past. The clues she discovers are baffling—a jewel-encrusted box that won't open and a camera with its film intact. What she finds out pulls Val into one of the world's greatest mysteries—what truly happened to the Grand Duchess Maria?

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Reader reviews.

"This epic story is so engrossing that readers will have difficulty putting it down." - Publishers Weekly "Gil Paul is a fabulous writer of historical fiction, taking true-life events and real people and giving them flesh, bones and spirit in a way no dull historical tome ever could." - My Weekly (UK) "Although twin time streams are a common device in historical novels, it is difficult to make them equally compelling. So often the drama of the historic stream trivialises the events of the modern one. This is an obvious danger here, but Paul succeeds in keeping our interest in both these very different stories until she finally brings them neatly together." - Historical Novel Society "In The Lost Daughter , [Gill Paul] has woven a heart-wrenching love story with a gripping historical mystery. This story is so real and compelling that you are there in the past and present all the way." - Karen Harper, New York Times bestselling author of American Duchess "Fascinating! Gill Paul captures this family and this period of history so vividly. Such a wonderful book!" - Hazel Gaynor, author of The Girl Who Came Home and The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter "A remarkable novel...I loved Maria's courage in the face of revolution and war, and adored her fierce determination to protect her family. The history is fascinating, the love story passionate and the characters moving." - Natasha Lester, international bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress "Riveting...At once richly descriptive and mysterious, Gill Paul demonstrates her extraordinary talents in this deeply affecting tale of war, forgiveness, and family legacy." - Heather Webb, internationally bestselling author of Meet Me in Monaco and Last Christmas in Paris "Completely immersive. Gorgeous. Beautiful writing, great characters. I enjoyed it so, so much. Just brilliant!" - Jenny Ashcroft, author of Last Letter to Bombay "With The Lost Daughter , she has returned to the tragic Romanovs, creating another fascinating story that asks the haunting question: 'what if one of them escaped?' A pleasure to dive into." - Kate Riordan, author of The Stranger and The Girl in the Photograph

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Author Information

Gill Paul is an author of historical fiction, specializing in relatively recent history. She has written two novels about the last Russian royal family: The Secret Wife , published in 2016, which tells the story of cavalry officer Dmitri Malama and Grand Duchess Tatiana, the second daughter of Russia's last tsar; and The Lost Daughter , published in October 2018, that tells of the attachment Grand Duchess Maria formed with a guard in the house in Ekaterinburg where the family was held from April to July 1918. Gill's other novels include Another Woman's Husband , about links you may not have been aware of between Wallis Simpson, later Duchess of Windsor, and Diana, Princess of Wales; Women and Children First , about a young steward who works on the Titanic; The Affair , set in Rome in 1961–62 as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fall in love while making Cleopatra; and No Place for a Lady , about two Victorian sisters who travel out to the Crimean War of 1854–56 and face challenges beyond anything they could have imagined.

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The Lost Daughter Book vs Movie Review

***WARNING! Spoilers for both book and movie!***

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante (2006)

The Lost Daughter directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal (2021)

Simone Weil – “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”.

Leda is a 48-year-old professor vacationing over the summer. She watches a family on the beach which includes a young mother (Nina) her daughter (Elena) and Elena’s doll which she treats like her own daughter.

One day Elena goes missing and Leda keeps a cool head and is able to find her. Elena is upset though because she can’t find her beloved doll. We later learn that Leda had stolen the doll before helping find Elena.

While interreacting with Nina and the family, we get flashbacks into Leda’s life and how she struggled to be a mother to her two daughters when they were young. Then, when the oldest was seven, she left for three years to pursue her career and to be with the man she had been having an affair with. However, after three years she decided to return to her daughters.

She still has guilt about having done this, and perhaps feels guilt about acknowledging that she loved getting that time away from them to focus on herself. Her selfish actions in life have now left her lonely at times, as we see here as she is alone on summer vacation. It seems this vacation has led her to reflect more on her past and actions and is forcing her to come to terms with it more so than she has up until this time.

With Nina, the two of them bond over the struggles of motherhood, though Nina can’t totally comprehend Leda just abandoning her daughters. Anyway, in the end Leda returns the doll and Nina is shocked that Leda stole it and kept it when Leda could see how upset Elena was about not having the doll. Nine ends up stabbing Leda in the side with her hat pin before leaving.

Leda is the antithesis of the perfect mom image we have. A woman who is so self sacrificing and will do anything for her kids and sacrifice herself for their sake. Gyllenhaal sees Leda as being an extreme example of something mothers go through-needing a breather from their kids and home life and needing time pursue their own wants and needs. Leda suffers the consequences of her choice to leave her girls for a time, so this story certainly isn’t saying that was Leda did was right. As we will be getting into in this episode.

Book Review

There are some books that when I finish, I know right away how I would rate it. This book was not that. I had to reflect on the book to really figure out how I felt about it.

I went into it knowing literally nothing about the plot and after I finished, I read others reviews that talked about how unlikeable Leda was. What does it say about me, that as I was reading, I didn’t find myself hating her?? Yes, she is selfish and acts in ways that don’t make sense. Stealing the doll and keeping it, for example. However, Ferrante did a wonderful job at putting you in Leda’s shoes and even though I didn’t condone her choices, I was able to see where she was coming from. I also love the nuance and subtlety of this story. We can see that Leda isn’t a great person, but Ferrante isn’t straight up telling us, “hey this character is bad and you should dislike her”. She just tells the story, showing us Leda’s life and internal dialogue, and leaves it to the reader to decide how they feel about it.

This book also has so many passages about motherhood and the mother/daughter relationship I found so interesting. I couldn’t relate to everything, for one I’m not a mother. But whether or not the section I found I relatable or not, I found all of it very intriguing and wanted to keep reading. The complications of parenthood are something that interest me. I find books about someone who has an estranged parent to be something I gravitate towards and now, reading about the person on the other end was very compelling.

Anyway, this is a four-star book and one I would recommend. I even thought of giving it a five star, but for now I’ll stick with four. It is less than 150 pages and this was a good call on Elena’s part. Sure, she could have gone more in details on other things, but I like that she kept it short and focused.

This is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debute, and I was very impressed! Ferrante would only give the rights to her novel if a woman directed the movie which makes total sense. I cannot imagine a man directing this movie.

Olivia Coleman is amazing as Leda. Her emotions are so raw and genuine, I don’t know who someone can watch this movie and not cry when she is crying. She is able to convey so much with her expressions and I was truly impressed.

Jessie Buckley plays young Leda, and again, she is amazing! You can feel her stress as she tries to be a mom while also pursuing her schooling and career and the freedom she feels when she is at the conference and how fullfilled she feels when she is acknowledged for her work. I talked about her for my podcast for I’m Thinking of Ending Things book vs movie and was impressed with her in that as well. She and Coleman are both nominated for an Oscar and the nominations are well deserved.

Dakota Johnson is Nina, the young mother and I thought she was great in the scene in the toy store when she is trying to get Elena to let go of her and you can see how she is at the end of her rope.

Ed Harris is great in his role as Lyle, the man Leda is renting her place from.

The book begins with the end-as does the movie. In the book though, we start with her waking up in the hospital because she crashed her car into the guardrail. She is fine, aside from a mysterious lesion on her side. She says of the lesion’s origin, “At the origin was a gesture of mine that made no sense, and which, precisely because it was senseless, I immediately decided not to speak of to anyone. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.”

At the end of the book, we see how she got the wound from Nina stabbing her with the hat pin. (The very hat pin Leda had bought for Nina). A bit after Nina leaves, her daughters call her and in unison ask why she hasn’t called and could she let them know if she is dead or alive. Leda responds with, “I’m dead, but I’m fine.” Then, we know from here she crashes her car, ends up in the hospital and her ex-husband, her daughters and people from work are there for her or on their way to her.

In the movie, she drives, then pulls over at the beach and falls. When she wakes up, she has an orange from a family nearby and gets a call from her daughters and when asked if she is dead or alive, she says she is alive. The orange is significant because in both book and movie her daughters had liked to watch her peel oranges because she kept the peel whole and peeled it to make a “snake”. This is the last thing she had done for them before leaving them for those three years. Of this scene in the book it reads, “All right, I said, took the orange, began to cut the peel. The children stared at me. I felt their gazes longing to tame me, but more brilliant was the brightness of the life outside them, new colors, new bodies, new  intelligence, a language to possess finally as if it were my true language, and nothing, nothing that seemed to me  reconcilable with that domestic space from which they stared at me in expectation. Ah, to make them invisible, to no longer hear the demands of their flesh as commands more pressing, more powerful than those which came from mine. I finished peeling the orange and I left. From that moment, for three years, I didn’t see or hear them  at all.”

The movie and book endings are very different with the line saying either I’m dead, then in the movie saying I’m alive. In the movie, has she had a coming to herself moment and is finally at peace with her past? Whereas in the movie, does she also come to terms with herself in a way and feel she has finally paid the price for her selfish actions by being stabbed? So maybe the two endings are so different after all, if in both she is at peace with her past actions. I heard someone else say how in the movie, who knows if her waking up on the beach was reality or not. I’m taking it more at face value and assuming it is still part of her life and she isn’t dreaming or dead. What do you think?

Her saying in the book, “I’m dead but I’m fine.” could definitely be her accepting herself for who she is. Acknowledging her selfishness and her coldness. I guess, whether or not this is a turning point in her life is up to interpretation.

Leaving her daughters

Another change is when she is talking to Nina about having left her kids. Nina asked why she came back after those three years and in the movie, Leda says that she started to miss them, that she’s a selfish person and so when she began to miss them she returned. In the book her response is very different,

“Because I realized that I wasn’t capable of creating anything of my own that could truly equal them.”

She had a sudden contented smile. “So you returned for love of your daughters.”

“No, I returned for the same reason I left: for love of myself.”

She again took offense. “What do you mean?”

“That I felt more useless and desperate without them than with them.”

In the book she also confesses to Nina and her sister-in-law (the pregnant woman) about leaving her daughters when in the toy store. Because of this, the sister-in-law (in the movie her name is Callie, in the book she is Rosaria) doesn’t want Nina to talk to Leda anymore. Callie thinks she understands motherhood because she is pregnant. But she doesn’t yet realize the harsh realities of being a mom the way Nina and Leda do.

In the movie, when asking about her young daughters, Leda says the line about not remembering much from that time. But then rather then tell them the truth, she gets dizzy and has to leave the store. It isn’t until later, when talking just to Nina, that Leda tells her about leaving. This happens like 1.5 hours into the movie whereas in the book this is revealed at about halfway, if not sooner.

In the book, we learn that at some point she wrote her daughters a letter explaining why she had left. Her daughters never spoke of it, and never spoke of the letter from her. Part of the letter we hear said, “I wrote: I needed to believe that I had done everything alone. I wanted, with increasing intensity, to feel myself, my talents, the autonomy of my abilities.” The letter shows that she has tried in the past to come to terms with things, but her daughters don’t want to forgive her and/or don’t want to face the trauma of what her actions did to them.

In book and movie, we get a lot of flashbacks to the time leading up to Leda leaving. We see in both when Bianca hits Leda and thinks it’s a game and Leda gets upset. She puts her in another room and slams the door causing the glass to break. This happens in the book as well, but the movie doesn’t show that when Bianca started to hit Leda, Leda began hitting her back.

We also see in both when one of the daughters hurts her fingers and is asking Leda to kiss it-a seemingly easy gesture. Yet Leda refuses. “I was frightened, yelled at her: I couldn’t leave her alone for a moment, there was never time for myself. I felt that I was suffocating, it seemed to me that I was betraying myself. For long minutes I refused to kiss her wound, the kiss that makes the pain go away. I wanted to teach her that you don’t do that…only Mama does it, who is grown up.”

After taking Elena’s doll, Leda thinks of the act, “An infantile reaction, nothing special, we never really grow up.” Leda often reacts childlike. Earlier with not giving Bianca the kiss, she was acting childish but the irony was that she was trying to show that she was an adult. Even not giving up the chair to the family when it was the pregnant woman’s birthday. It was annoying they were being bossy about wanting the chair, but really, she could easily have just moved off to the side and it’s no big deal.

Stealing the doll and choosing to keep it for so long was interesting. Elena, the girl, treats the doll as if it is her own daughter. When Leda sees Nina and Elena interacting there is a moment when Leda finds Nina annoying. As if she is just putting on a show of being a good mom.

When the doll is missing, Elena is sick and throws fits, and seems to regress in age without her doll. You can compare this to Leda, who was without her daughters, yet it was her choice and she seemed to be doing relatively fine not having her daughters around. Her mom was even helping with the girls, which Leda was upset about because she did not like her mother or her hometown and had been proud of escaping both. yet she didn’t have a say in the matter because she chose to not take part in parenting them at that point.

I suppose she wanted to care for the doll, maybe to make up for not being a great mom. It’s easy to be a good mom to a doll because a doll doesn’t actually require anything from you.

She gets all the muddy water out of the dolls belly and discovers that had also been a worm in there. She thinks how she too has a darkness inside her. “You keep your liquid darkness in your stomach…I, too, was hiding many dark things, in silence.”

There are a number of things in this book (and movie) that seem significant or symbolic. We have the cicada that is on her pillow her first night on vacation; the pinecone that mysteriously hits her back as she walks back to her room; the fruit that looks good on the front, but once picked up we see it has rotted; then of course the doll itself.

The events that disrupt her vacation could represent how things do go as you dream they will. She thought she could be a mom and life would be good but turns out it was harder than she had realized. She thought she could go on this vacation and enjoy herself, but different events disrupt her vacation and it isn’t a dreamy as it initally appeared to be. She also thought leaving her daughters would lead to a better life for her, but we see that it wasn’t as fullfilling as it initally appeared to be and so she returns to them.

Child/parent relationship

Leda did not have a good relationship with her own mother. Her mom always threatened to leave, and Leda would lay in bed at night fearing she would wake up to find her mother gone. She felt that her mother was disconnected from her, even repulsed by her. She did not like her own childhood and being able to escape her mother and her hometown at 18 was a big moment in her life. She even says in the book that her worst nightmare would be to relive her childhood years. Yet she held onto her childhood doll for a long time. Until she gives it to her daughter, who does not care for the doll and mistreats it. Leda is upset about this and throws it out the window where it is crushed by passing cars as she and the daughter watch.

Anyway, I wanted to share a couple passages I found interesting.

“My daughters make a constant effort to be the reverse of me.”

“How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say: I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.”

 “I realized long ago that I’ve held onto little of myself and everything of them. Even now, I was looking at Gino through the filter of Bianca’s experiences, of Marta’s, according to the tastes and passions I imagine as theirs.”

We hear that Nina’s family are “bad people” but that’s it. This is one aspect that could have been expounded upon but really, the reason why they are bad doesn’t matter in the context of the story Ferrante is telling. This is a story about mothers and daughters. 

“Men are, in the world of Leda and Nina and Elena and even Mina, deeply beside the point, satellites orbiting around their central world, annoyances to be dealt with and expelled or dangers to be dodged. Yet each of these women live a life still structured by male intrusions, expectations, and impositions. The reference to Zeus’s apocalyptic, cataclysmic rape of Leda, which results in Helen, another woman whose mere existence so agitates men that they launch the Trojan War, is pointed. Leda is experiencing all of this on a beach in Greece to underline the point: mothers and daughters, for millennia, are always living in that brutal world of men, and trying to carve out their own world inside of it… in the end she can’t outrun the facts of the world in which she lives. She is happy and miserable, full of love and also frustrated by it. She’s no heroine, not someone to emulate. But as she sees herself in Nina and even in Elena, they can spot a kind of future in her; they’re all of a piece with one another. Daughters like them, and mothers too, are always getting lost in the world. The older they get, the more they realize it’s their own responsibility to find themselves.” 1

We also see in the movie in particular, various men who have left their children but society doesn’t judge them for it as much as they judge a woman for leaving her kids. The male hiker has children he left, Lyle’s kids are in America while he has been in Greece the last 30 years, and Tony, Nina’s husband, is only there at random times.

Book or Movie?

I think the beginning, when Leda is observing Nina and her family, works really well in a movie. Even though this book is a lot of Leda’s internal thoughts and emotions, the movie is able to convey those things without the use of a narrator. In the scene when Leda has dinner with Will (in the book his name is Gino) in the movie she tells him much more about herself and her daughters. This wasn’t in the book, but the movie used that scene as an opportunity to see her thoughts.

Overall, I think I may like the movie adaptation better. It follows the book extremely close, and is beautifully made. And again, Coleman was incredible. Even though her character did some bad things, Coleman was sympathetic and pitiable. When she is telling Nina about having left her daughters, the scene is so powerful and it is followed by young Leda peeling the orange and leaving her daughters. So poignant! How can anyone see that part of the movie and not tear up at least a bit.

Leda is struggling the actions of her past when watching and interacting with Nina and her daughter and the doll. She also wants to have a chance to talk to Nina one on one rather than having the sister-in-law there because she feels Nina will be able to understand her since she herself is a mother. Nina confides in Leda that she too, sometimes would like to escape. I’m not saying this is how all mothers feel. I really have no idea, but obviously some mothers do. This book shows the ambivalence of being a parent, but particularly being a mom. Especially since society makes women feel like they should want to have children and their kids should come before everything else. But then Leda chooses herself over her children for a time.

Ultimately, I felt this story touch me with both book and movie. The movie though caused me to cry, whereas the book didn’t, so it seems fair to say the movie wins due to it causing me to feel even more emotion. I would recommend the book though because it gives you so much to think about and reflect on whether you are a parent or mother or not.

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The Lost Daughter review: Motherhood isn't easy

Olivia Colman toplines an excellent cast in Maggie Gyllenhaal's nuanced directorial debut.

Senior Editor, Movies

Meeting Leda, a middle-aged British professor on summer holiday in Greece, you wouldn't raise an eyebrow, at first. ( Olivia Colman turns the mundane into something quietly extraordinary.) She is alone — no shame in that — and clearly loves her freedom, sticking her head out the window of her rented car and smiling in the warm island breeze. Leda also values her privacy and when a brassy Queens family, also on vacation, invades her space on the beach, she pushes back, tartly but firmly.

But something deeper gnaws at her, which we begin to detect as The Lost Daughter shades itself in, expertly, at a pace that flatters close watchers and listeners. Leda is cross-cut with two women who inform her story: First, there's a twentysomething mother on a nearby chaise lounge, Nina ( Dakota Johnson , never better), one of the Queens clan. Her hair is a tangle and she's overwhelmed by her child and an enervating sense of depression.

Then, in flashback, we see a younger version of Leda herself ( Jessie Buckley , expertly nailing the trickiest turn of the film), struggling to make good on her academic ambitions as two rambunctious kids fray her nerves. "Children are a crushing responsibility," the grown-up Leda says, not so casually or warmly, and you lean in, bracing for a different kind of movie. When that film finally arrives, you're knocked back by its boldness.

Much of this delicious complexity is due to Elena Ferrante, the popular pseudonymous Italian author on whose 2006 novel this film is based. (If you're up on HBO's My Brilliant Friend , it's tempting to see Leda as some grown-up variation of bookish Lenù.) But the lion's share of the credit for the film working as well as it does belongs to Maggie Gyllenhaal , making her directorial debut in a project she might have easily starred in.

You expect Gyllenhaal, herself an intuitive performer in movies like Secretary and Crazy Heart , to be generous with the actors, letting them lean into the awkward tensions and on-the-fly revisions where the magic happens. But it's unexpected — and significant — that she adapted the material herself, choosing a book with no less than five major female characters. There's a real filmmaker here as well, and The Lost Daughter displays a storytelling confidence and technical flair that veterans strain to achieve.

In some moments, Gyllenhaal confidently dials down the volume of the dialogue, resulting in poetic images that are almost unbearable to watch, like one of a child's doll flung from an apartment window, shattering on the pavement below. In another scene, the director pumps up Roberta Flack's churning, wailing "I Told Jesus" as sonic terrain to a heartbreaking scene of abandonment, the front door closing to pleas.

Most impressively, Gyllenhaal refuses to judge her characters, even as they stray into behavior that's messy and damaged. Leda commits an act on the island (no spoilers here) that you might find unspeakable, something truly mean-spirited, and still, Colman has us hanging on her every nuance and inflection. Carefully, Gyllenhaal is extending to her audience a trust, namely that we'll summon the empathy to explore the roots of someone's pain. It's a moviegoing experience, sure — and if you need to hear it, one of the best of the year. But it's really a call to compassion, which makes it transcendent. A

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‘The Lost Daughter’ Book Review

5 March 2017

The Lost Daughter is a novel by Italian author Elena Ferrante ( Days of Abandonment , My Brilliant Friend ) and tells the story of a woman who sets about on a holiday to re-discover herself after her daughters have flown the nest. Ferrante writes the female inner monologue like no one else, and it is what she’s known for. A brutally frank insight into the feelings of a middle-aged woman questioning the decisions she has made and her role as a mother, it ticks all the boxes as a character-driven first person narrative and is unapologetically powerful.

Ferrante (a pseudonym the novelist works under) has been described as one of the world’s most influential female writers, with her works translated into many languages including English, Dutch, French and German. The Lost Daughter is a strong example of why; a difficult subject matter tackled unabashedly and with great wisdom. The heroine goes away to enjoy a relaxing retreat alone, but her peace is interrupted by a noisy family whom initially captivate her, but who she grows to find almost unbearably irritating. A chain of fairly insignificant events unnerve her, and we follow her spiral into herself and what she wants to believe about herself versus what she is increasingly realising to be true. In a similar manner to her other novels, the author looks at the truth behind marriage and motherhood, and what women want to be and then how that’s lost.

Ferrante’s style is intensely elegant and almost violent; a disarming combination that makes the text hypnotic. It’s still not easy to read, it’s far too potent for that. She provides a unique perspective on femininity that is not often visible in any form of the media, even literature, which often deserves praise for its diversity. It’s almost terrifying to read such a candid, ferocious book and yet see so much of the women around you reflected in it. Many women have a piece of a Ferrante novel inside themselves and either haven’t discovered it yet or have and want to deny its existence, and this fact taints each page with a bittersweet depth of understanding and insight. Ferrante is an important author, who writes beautifully and with subdued anger that writhes on the page. She is someone who I feel everyone should read something of, and if you haven’t, you’re missing out.

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