49 pages • 1 hour read
Elena FerranteThe Lost Daughter
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The novel opens with the protagonist, Leda, driving. She suffers a sudden attack of pain and weakness that causes her to lose consciousness and drive off the road. In her altered state, Leda imagines herself on the beach. When she was a child, her mother always warned her against swimming when a red flag indicated dangerous waters. Even though she is an adult, Leda remembers the fear her mother instilled and feels too afraid to enter the water. When she awakes later in the hospital, unharmed except for an “inexplicable lesion” on her left side, she knows the accident wasn’t caused by drowsiness, as the doctor suggests. Instead, it was caused by something Leda did but didn’t understand.
Chapter 2 Summary
Leda describes how her adult daughters, Bianca and Marta, moved to Toronto, Canada, to live near their father. Instead of feeling sad or lonely, Leda thrives in her daughters’ absence. Her “only obligation” is to call them daily. Otherwise, she is free to live her own life. She works and studies whenever she likes, eats at a trattoria near her house, and even finds her body looking more like that of her younger self. She focuses easily and finds herself in a “state of unusual well-being” (12).
For the summer, Leda rents an apartment on the Ionian coast. It is her first vacation in many years that doesn’t center on her daughters’ needs, and Leda is excited about the opportunity. However, during the drive, she starts to feel anxious. She is sure the town and her apartment will be hot and ugly and thinks she would have been more comfortable spending the summer at home in Florence.
When she arrives, Giovanni, the elderly caretaker, helps Leda to her apartment, where she finds a lovely terrace and a display of tempting-looking fruits. Upon closer inspection, Leda finds that much of the fruit is rotted and throws it away, disgusted. Instead of eating, she decides to sleep, but she finds a cicada on her pillow. Leda contemplates the insect, thinking about how female cicadas cannot sing, then tosses the insect out the window.
Chapter 3 Summary
The next morning, Leda packs her bag and drives to the beach. The beach is separated from the road by a stretch of pinewood, and the smell of it reminds Leda of her childhood holidays. There is a small bathhouse on the beach, and a handsome young attendant named Gino takes Leda to an umbrella. She wonders which of her daughters would find Gino attractive and remarks on how she looks at the world through their eyes instead of her own.
Leda settles into a gentle routine on her patch of beach, arriving every day through the pinewood forest and settling under her umbrella to read, nap, and swim in the ocean.
Chapter 4 Summary
When Leda first notices a young woman and her daughter playing on the beach, she doesn’t know if they just arrived or if she failed to see them before. Leda had ignored the large and “rather loud” Neapolitan family that had appeared on the beach a few days earlier because they reminded her of her family when she was a child. However, when she notices the mother and her small daughter, she is drawn to them. Leda sees the woman as distinct from the rest of her family, more beautiful and refined. Leda begins watching her over the top of her book and is captivated by how mother and child seem completely absorbed by each other, “as if they existed alone” (18).
She observes them splashing in the water together and playing intently with the child’s doll. Through her observations, Leda learns that the woman’s name is Nina, her daughter is Elena, and the doll is called Nani, Nena, or Nennella. Hearing Nina speak in her Neapolitan dialect reminds Leda of her mother, who would sometimes lose control and shout at her daughters that she was leaving them, although she never followed through on those threats. Leda sees Nina playing with Elena and envies the woman’s tranquility.
Chapter 5 Summary
Leda finds she has already spent a week on vacation. On Saturday, the beach is more crowded than usual, and she has difficulty finding Nina and Elena among the crowd. She finally spots them close to the water. Nina is lying on a lounge chair next to the doll while Elena collects water from the ocean in a watering can and pours it over her mother and the doll. For some reason, Leda is annoyed by their interactions. She calls Elena’s game “obtusely methodical” and feels that Nina’s participation is performative; she wants everyone on the beach to see her in the “role of beautiful young mother” (22). The game irks Leda until she is tempted to insist they stop, wanting to tell them they are playing it wrong. Instead, she calms herself by cooling her feet in the water.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Narrated in the first person by Leda, the novel’s protagonist, The Lost Daughter opens with a cryptic chapter that describes Leda returning from her beach vacation after all the novel’s events. The wound on her side results from Nina stabbing her with a hatpin after Leda tries to return Elena’s doll. In her hospital bed, Leda still doesn’t know why she took Nani. She calls it “a gesture of mine that made no sense” and resolves not to mention it (10). The rest of the novel moves back in time as Leda tries to understand what motivated her to take the doll.
This first chapter is isolated; there is little to indicate its meaning or its relationship to the rest of the story until the novel’s end. The result is a disorientating vignette that introduces themes of importance throughout the story, including Leda’s insecurities, the ongoing influence of Leda’s childhood, and the blurring lines between the past and present. In particular, the theme of The Relationship Between the Past and Present is established in the first chapter. Elena Ferrante hints at how time blends together for Leda by beginning the novel in an unspecified moment. Throughout the novel, her childhood remains very present, as do memories of raising her daughters. Sometimes, Leda even gets lost in her memories to the point of confusion, generating a sense of disorientation that is replicated in Leda’s daydream of the beach, as she imagines her mother “shout[ing] at [her] as if [she] were still a child” (10). Here, past and present blur together, and Leda is simultaneously an adult and a child, foreshadowing her childish action that sets the plot in motion.
Over the first five chapters, Leda’s ambivalence toward motherhood becomes clear as the theme of Motherhood and the Complexity of Female Identity is established. The first time Leda mentions her daughters, she confesses to feeling “miraculously unfettered” after they move to Canada. This is the first time Leda admits her unmotherly tendencies, and she is “embarrassed” by the admission. She thinks the joy she feels in her daughters’ absence is unnatural and so experiences guilt. Seeing Nina on the beach, Leda is initially captivated because motherhood seems to come naturally to the younger woman. She looks like a proper mother who has “no desire for anything but her child” (19), unlike Leda, who struggled with a lack of maternal instinct and is now enjoying a vacation alone while her daughters are far away. However, Leda’s jealousy is also motivated by her unhappy childhood and difficult relationship with her own mother. Watching Nina makes Leda think of her mother’s endless threats to leave, suggesting Leda feels “envious” as both a mother and daughter. She wishes her own mother could have been more like Nina.
Throughout The Lost Daughter, Leda challenges the romance of motherhood. Women are expected to embrace motherhood as the pinnacle of their lives, loving their children selflessly and unconditionally. However, Leda, who loves her daughters but often feels suffocated by them, exposes the difficulty and ugliness that often comes with motherhood. This idea is exemplified in the motif of rotting and decay throughout the novel. Things that appear beautiful from the outside often become ugly and unpleasant upon closer inspection, mirroring Leda’s experience with motherhood and Nina’s as well. The rotting dish of fruit in Leda’s rented apartment is an important instance of this motif. The decayed fruit’s repulsiveness invades the tranquility of the apartment and foreshadows the darkness and tension that will color Leda’s vacation.
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