By comparison between pioneering ladies in O Pioneers! and My Antonia and lost ladies in A Lost Lady and My Mor tal Enemy,this thesis aims at presenting the independent formers’wholesome loyalty to love and the reliant latters’marital be trayal.Nihilistic,cynic and despaired,the lost ladies had depraved from romantic love to self-destruction based on material hedo nism;diligent,enterprising and persistent,the pioneering ladies,from innocent girlhood to weather-beaten middle age,had real ized self-fulfillment both in spiritualization and prosperous homesteads.