I’m a fan of the pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante, whom I have identified as a Favorite elsewhere in this website. Nevertheless, I must say The Lost Daughter is not among her best works. Maybe I was expecting more after reading the Neapolitan Novels, which set a high standard. This short novel fails to capture the attention and imagination of readers like Ferrante’s other works. The first-person narrator, Leda, is an unappealing, selfish woman.
She is well-educated and has a successful career as an English teacher in Italy. Her own adult daughters live in Canada with their father, but she maintains contact with them by phone. The drama of the story is mostly in Leda’s head as she interacts with a vacationing family on a beach along the Ionian coast near Naples. She becomes obsessed with the family, finds a doll belonging to a daughter, and then inexplicably refuses to return it to the child. Her actions become more complex and cringeworthy. The ending offers no insight or reveals anything we should have seen coming.