Antara Datta

This paper examines the mother-daughter relationship in Elena Ferrante’s novella The Lost Daughter. Ferrante reframes motherhood from the perspective of maternal subjectivity. Her work enables a critical examination of motherhood, generational trauma, and the complexity of female agency through the lead character Leda’s unconventional approach to motherhood. The paper argues that the ambivalence towards the experience and role of motherhood in the work is reconciled, but only tentatively, in the act of writing, and scrutinized through the critical eye of a literature scholar.