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 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
When the rain begins to slow, Leda gets in her car. She drives with no clear destination, and more memories come to her. She remembers visiting another beach with her husband and another couple. The woman, Lucilla, took a liking to Marta and Bianca. She was completely focused on “seducing” them with games and attention while never attempting to build a relationship with their mother. Because Lucilla bore no responsibility for the children, she was allowed to play the role of the “good mother,” letting them behave as they pleased. Afterward, Leda was left to discipline, reinstate her daughters’ routines, and play the “bad mother.” Just the thought of this old injustice makes Leda angry.
She thinks about how Lucilla was sometimes left out of Marta and Bianca’s games, which gratified Leda. However, excluded, Lucilla would begin to enumerate the girls’ faults, which caused Leda to “suffer again.” She remembers a specific incident when Marta started crying while Bianca and Lucilla played together. Fed up, Leda insisted that her husband deal with the child, and soon both daughters were playing happily with their father and Lucilla. Leda was the one excluded. Realizing she had lost an earring, she broke up the happy group by demanding her husband help her look for it. That night Leda lost control, shouting that she never wanted to see Lucilla again.
Chapter 17 Summary
Leda arrives back on her stretch of beach, emptied by the rain. She thinks about the letters she wrote to Bianca and Marta, describing why she left them when they were small. They never mentioned the confession, and Leda laments that children can’t see their mothers as anything but a “function.” However, because she is not Nina’s mother, she thinks the young woman might listen to and understand her.
Leda digs in the sand and wishes she had brought the doll to leave there for Nina to find the next day. She wonders again why she took the toy and bought clothes for it instead of returning it. Not sure what else to do, Leda walks along the water and continues to think about her past. She reflects on how tired she was when her children were small and how this caused her to fall out of love with her husband.
Driving across Italy to visit Gianni’s family one year, Leda’s husband stopped to pick up two hitchhikers, a couple from England who had quit their jobs and left their respective families to travel and experience freedom. At first, Leda was annoyed with the hitchhikers and her husband’s generosity. However, as she listened to them speak, she admired them more and more. Leda invited the couple to spend the night in their house, and as the evening progressed, she found herself “captivated” by the woman, Brenda. Leda talked to Brenda the whole night, telling her all about her studies. Brenda even asked Leda if she could read something the other woman had written.
When the couple took their leave the next morning, Leda found herself fantasizing about Brenda and having her freedom. For the first time, she thought about leaving her family and starting her own life.
Back on the beach, Leda tires of walking and returns to the bathhouse. There, the Neapolitan children are handing out flyers promising a reward for Elena’s missing doll.
Chapter 18 Summary
When Leda returns to her apartment, she is distressed. Seeing Nani bothers her, and she takes the doll clothes out of her purse to see if they will fit. To Leda’s disgust, more dirty water comes out of the doll’s mouth, and when she parts the doll’s soft plastic lips, she can hear the water sloshing in its stomach. Leda abandons the doll on the sofa and goes to bed. Tomorrow, she tells herself, she will return Nani.
Leda heads to the beach the following day, but Elena and Nina are nowhere to be seen. Rosaria tells Leda that Elena is still sick and that Nina is watching over her at home. Leda thinks about telling Rosaria that she has the doll but decides against it because Rosaria reminds Leda too much of her own family, which she fought so hard to escape.
Leda thinks about how she had “aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective” (87), far away from her home city of Naples. As a young woman, Leda escaped to the more cultured city of Florence, where she studied literature and tried to shake off her Neapolitan roots. When she abandoned her daughters with her husband, she was distressed that he sometimes took the girls to stay with Leda’s mother, returning them to the “black well” that Leda had worked so hard to leave behind. She hated her mother for her influence over Marta and Bianca, and when she took them back, she tried hard to erase the taint of Naples that she heard in their speech.
Leda reflects that her mother’s influence did little harm, and she feels guilty for how she treated the woman. She also realizes that she has not left Naples as far behind as she would like to believe. She has more in common with Rosaria than her daughters, who “belong to another time” (90). Leda thinks about what else she can say to the other woman but realizes that her confession has made Rosaria see her in a new light. She no longer believes that Leda is a “good friend” for Nina.
Leda leaves the beach, looking for the Neapolitans’ villa. As she walks, she calls the number on the missing doll poster, hoping it is Nina’s. Nina does answer, and in that moment Leda sees her through the trees. She is with Gino, who kisses her.
Chapter 19 Summary
Back on the beach, Leda swims, thinking about Nina and Gino. Witnessing the encounter disturbed her, making her feel like a “frightened child.” She thinks it has been too long since she spoke to her daughters and wonders if their absence isn’t good for her after all. She leaves, intending to call them.
In her car, Leda continues thinking about her past. Brenda’s visit had inspired in Leda a desire she had never experienced before, and a wish for a more fulfilling sex life began to infiltrate her days. When her professor invited Leda to a literary conference that focused on the topic of her work, she protested that she couldn’t leave her children. Leda couldn’t afford the trip, and she was barely working. Her professor insisted, so Leda prepared four days’ worth of meals for her family and left for London. During one of the presentations, Leda began fantasizing about the speaker, a prominent academic called Hardy. She was shocked when she heard him say her name, quoting one of Leda’s papers in his presentation. It was the article she had given to Brenda.
Hardy’s recognition was a great professional success for Leda. She immediately called her husband to tell him the news, but the conversation quickly turned to the girls. Marta had chickenpox. Hanging up, Leda felt overwhelmed. Sure that her daughter would be fine, she put Marta’s illness out of her head to focus on her own success. Leda was introduced to Hardy, and the two began an affair. When she returned home, Leda started working obsessively. Her professor was suddenly supportive and interested in her work, and her relationship with Hardy was new and exciting.
Back at the apartment, Leda begins talking to Elena’s doll to avoid thinking of her daughters. She cleans and dresses the doll but is soon lost in thought again. Leda never contacted Brenda to thank her for sharing the article with Professor Hardy. She avoided it, she thinks, to prove that she could succeed on her own. Following her success at the conference, Leda was surrounded by her intellectual equals for the first time. She found the courage to leave her husband and children and pursue her own life. Leda saw her daughters one last time, and they asked her to peel an orange in one go, like a “snake.” Leda performed this last motherly duty but felt no desire to stay with her daughters. She didn’t see them again for three years.
Chapter 20 Summary
Leda’s thoughts are interrupted by her apartment’s buzzer. She is surprised to find Giovanni waiting with a freshly caught fish. He offers to clean and fry it for her, and soon they sit together to share the food and a glass of wine. Giovanni is older than Leda. He has three grown children and is a grandfather. The two talk tenderly about their children and grandchildren, and Giovanni begins reminiscing about the past, saying that children nowadays are spoiled and people don’t appreciate things as they used to. Leda thinks of her grandmother and how “women of the past” coped with the pressures of motherhood (110).
She feels dizzy and lies down on the couch. Giovanni worries, but Leda insists she is fine. She recovers, and the two go to the terrace, where Giovanni spots the doll. Leda claims it is hers, and Giovanni asks if she has heard about Elena’s missing doll.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
The chapters in this section highlight the complexity of female friendship in the context of motherhood. Leda is frustrated in her relationship with her daughters because she wants to be seen by them as a human, not a “function.” However, Leda also finds that most of society sees her only as a mother, including other women, and she struggles to have relationships with women that do not revolve around her children. Furthermore, most women in Leda’s life make her feel more inadequate as a mother, both those with children, like Nina, and those without, like Lucilla. Leda remarks, “Lucilla never spoke to me, I didn’t interest her” (75). Instead, Lucilla actively tried to outperform Leda by spoiling her daughters and stealing their attention.
Rosaria behaves similarly in the toy store. Although she is not yet a mother, she is eager to show off her skills and takes Elena when Nina cannot calm the child, wanting to prove she can do it “better than her sister-in-law” (68). Seeing this makes Leda feel a kinship with Nina, and the two are the only women in the novel to bond over the shared struggle of raising children. Nina looks past Rosaria to tell Leda, “Sometimes you just can’t cope anymore” (68).
Brenda is the first woman in the novel to take an interest in Leda outside of her role as a mother. Leda remarks that Brenda was particularly interested in hearing about her work, “something that never happened” (82). Leda can hardly believe it when Brenda asks her for a piece of her writing. She describes how she “savored the formation—something of mine” (83), relishing the feeling of accomplishment it gave her. The interest and attention that Brenda gave Leda was incredibly empowering. It was the first time Leda realized she could be appreciated for more than being a mother, which gave her the courage to dream of a different life.
The attention that Leda receives from Hardy and the other academics at the conference further bolsters her sense of independence and individuality, strengthening her conviction that she exists outside the realm of motherhood. She describes falling “in love with anyone who said [she] was smart, intelligent, helped [her] to test [her]self” (101). At the conference Leda began to feel as if she “really was a creature out of the ordinary” (101). The repetition of this phrase, “creature out of the ordinary,” draws a connection to young Leda’s complacency about motherhood and her subsequent sense of failure when she found herself trapped in the same circumstances as other women in her family. That she finally feels seen as extraordinary at the conference illustrates that academia gives her what motherhood cannot: an identity she desires.
Leda’s memories and thoughts about motherhood also lead her to think of her own mother, with whom she shared a complicated relationship. As a girl and young woman, Leda could only see her mother’s faults and was desperate not to follow her mother’s example. As an adult, Leda can finally see her mother as a woman and appreciate her struggles. She thinks, “Poor Mama,” as she remembers how harshly she criticized the woman in her youth. It has taken her own experience of motherhood to see her mother as more than a “function,” which suggests that her daughters may someday come to identify with her in a more equal way.
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