Lost (53 page)

 

Lines from “The Eleventh Episode,” copyright © 1972 by Edward Gorey, are reprinted by permission of Donadio & Olson, Inc.

 

•

 

Assistance of many varieties was offered me in the writing of
Lost
. I would like to thank the following:

 

Harriet Barlow, Sheila Kinney, and Ben Strader of Blue Mountain Center, New York, for the persistence of their welcome;

 

Karen Latuchie and Betty Levin for early readings of the manuscript;

 

Anthony and Jane Bicknell, Putney, for letting me riffle through their library as I researched urban domestic construction in London in the nineteenth century;

 

Professor Bill Burgwinkle, King's College, Cambridge, for his expertise in medieval and early modern Romance languages;

 

Kathy Francis, textile conservator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, for advice on fabric and how it ages;

 

Fiona North of Clapham, England, for sharing some but not all of the particulars of her business in plaster-casting the hands of children;

 

Jill Paton Walsh and John Rowe Townsend, Cambridge, England, for answering any number of questions about matters of Britain;

 

Jean-Claude Schmitt, whose book
Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society
(The University of Chicago Press) was an invaluable research tool;

 

Ann, Sid, and Heather Seamans for their hospitality in Hampstead, London;

 

Ellen Gutman Chenaux of The Birchwood Inn, Lenox, Massachusetts, for being the chatelaine of an ideal place to read and work.

 

•

 

And, not least,

 

William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates, New York;

 

Judith Regan and Cassie Jones of ReganBooks, New York;

 

Jen Suitor of the HarperCollins publicity department;

 

Douglas Smith for the jacket and interior illustrations;

 

. . . and Andy Newman, of Concord, Massachusetts, for making my travel arrangements in Paris and Normandy and for providing a home to which to return.

About the Author

 

Gregory Maguire's first two books,
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
and
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
, were national bestsellers that earned him rave reviews and a dedicated literary following. Maguire received his doctorate at Tufts University and has served as an artist-in-residence at the Blue Mountain Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Hambidge Center. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

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Ω

1. As a reader of adult novels, in what ways do you recognize a literary setting—like London—as the setting of other works of fiction? Is London an endlessly reinventable template, equally suitable to house Shakespeare and Milton, Eliza Doolittle and Jack the Ripper, and Mary Poppins and Peter Pan?
   
2. Have you ever gone to a place you've previously only read about, and known yourself to be, instantly and fully, at home?
   
3. Who is the “he” Winnie refers to when she thinks, “Will anyone else be waiting? . . . Will he be there?” Is it John Comestor? Irv Hausserman? Emil Pritzke? What do you think:
   will
   he be there?
   
4. Lost
   plays with the notion of life having to be lived in the wake of sorrow and tragedy and with the idea that no life comes without its cost in trauma. In time, we learn what Winnie has lost and what it has cost her. Who else in the novel struggles on in an incomplete life? Is there anyone who has
   not
   suffered a mourning as significant as Winnie's?
   
5. Dante's
   Inferno
   begins, “In the middle of my life's road, I found myself in a dark wood . . .” and from there he descends not quite into madness but certainly into Hell. Likewise, Alice in Wonderland enters her adventures by falling—descending into a parallel version of her daylight world in which nothing is what it seems. In what ways is Winnie's descent an excursion into if not madness, at least confusion? In what ways is Winnie—like Dante and Alice—a voyager in a real otherworld?
   
6. Lost
   derives, in part, from a sentimental starting point: the ghoulish and sometimes saccharine concoction by Charles Dickens,
   A Christmas Carol
   . Does the Christian message of charity—the transformation toward which Ebenezer Scrooge is led by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and To Come—have any influence in the life of Winnie Rudge? Does she follow a different path?
   
7. Written before the attacks of September 11, 2001, and published just a few weeks after, does
   this paragraph
   seem prescient and pertinent?
   
8. Building upon this notion, in what way is fantasy a distraction from the real world? Do you find this to be true in your own world?
   
9. Some people find Winnie Rudge to be downright unlikable. How did you feel about her? When you realized the traumatic reason for her compulsive evasion of the truth, did you find her orneriness and prickliness understandable? Forgivable?
   
10. Is Winnie redeemed in the final pages of the novel? Is she likely to follow the path of Mary Lenahan Fogarty toward the adoption of a child? Is Winnie even there at all, or has she become a ghost herself, an agent of quiet assistance in someone else's hour of need?
    

Praise for Gregory Maguire's
LOST

 

“Gregory Maguire is a delightful storyteller with an absolutely unique imagination.
Lost
seems to me to be his best novel yet, which is saying something. A reader who hasn't discovered his work is in for a treat and a revelation. I wish I
thought
like Gregory Maguire.”

—Peter S. Beagle, author of
Tamsin
and
A Dance for Emilia

 

“Haunts your imagination until the last page is turned. . . . Keeps the reader balanced on a knife's edge.”

—Rob Thomas,
Capital Times

 

“Maguire combines humor, mystery, and menace adroitly. . . . His prose is muscular. . . . [F]ans will not be disappointed.”

—
Portsmouth Herald

 

And for
WICKED: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE
WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST

 

“Gregory Maguire's shrewdly imagined first novel . . . is part fantasy thriller, part psychological study, part political cautionary tale. It's all fascinating. And it's impossible to deny the magic of Gregory Maguire's prose.”

—
New York Newsday

 

“Save a place on the shelf between
Alice
and
The Hobbit
—that spot is well deserved.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

 

And for
CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER

 

“[A] brilliantly plotted fantasy. . . . Maguire is rapidly becoming one of contemporary fiction's most assured myth-makers.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred)

 

“Captivating and beautifully written . . .
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
is a rich canvas of colorful characters and fantastic events rendered by an artist attentive to every surface and texture.”

—
Book
magazine

 

Wicked

 

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Credits

 

Cover illustration © 1999 by Douglas Smith
Illustrations by Douglas Smith
Cover design by John Lewis

LOST
. Copyright © 2001 by Gregory Maguire. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Contains
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens (1843)

EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2002 ISBN: 9780061748660

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2001 by Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

First paperback edition published 2002.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

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