'forlornness' is a correct and usable word in written English.
You can use it to refer to a feeling of being abandoned, helpless, and powerless. For example: She held back tears as she felt a deep forlornness in her heart.
Kierkegaard's stress on the forlornness of the human condition, as well as on the absence of certainty concerning the possibility of salvation, made him an important forerunner of 20th-century existentialism.
The most accomplished playwright working within this mode was Terence Rattigan, whose carefully crafted, conventional-looking plays in particular, The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954 affectingly disclose desperations, terrors, and emotional forlornness concealed behind reticence and gentility.
His vivid, funny, and biting films have made us aware of the misery of dashed expectations ("High Hopes"), the power of surly narcissism ("Naked"), the underside of creative partnership ("Topsy-Turvy"), the depths of working-class forlornness ("All or Nothing") and inarticulate sacrifice ("Vera Drake").
But much of the forlornness of the frightening spaces in Beckett — the little rooms, the blasted heaths, the madhouses, the ditch in the rain, the country road with its one tree, the little glass jar near the slaughterhouse, and all the sequestered, jesting minds — is that these are sites forsaken by meaning, bereft of sense.
The general forlornness supports the mood of Hamdan's prison letters to his family, which sound anguished, pious, and unthreatening.
The director, Jaume Collet-Serra ("Orphan"), tells the story from Harris's point of view, and, as he staggers around the city (dark and wet, like the New York in "The Adjustment Bureau"), Collet-Serra uses a subjective camera to put us inside Harris's sense of exclusion, inside his forlornness and his paranoia.
DAVID DENBY: What's fascinating to me about Heartbreak Ridge is the sense of forlornness in the hero, Gunny.
But "Her" captures the ache of loneliness, the forlornness of a society advancing into estranged person units.
"I have tried to find another Yaya in my squad," said Mancini, with a heavy touch of Italian forlornness.
It was the forlornness of the abandoned trees that inspired her to start "dragging them home and personifying them, caring for them, trying to make the tree like me and me like it," said the artist, whose artwork was all the more compelling because it was so utterly without obvious commercial intent.
The self-lacerating interior monologue of an actor wilting in the spotlight is rendered by Ms. Wolfe with touching forlornness: Why did I pick these shoes?
