The Sea Lady

This article is about the 1902 novel. For the 2006 novel by Margaret Drabble, see The Sea Lady (2006 novel).
The Sea Lady

First edition title page
Author H. G. Wells
Original title The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine
Genre Fantasy
Publisher Methuen
Publication date
July 1902
Pages 301
OCLC 639905
Preceded by The Discovery of the Future
Followed by Mankind in the Making

The Sea Lady is a fantasy novel written by H. G. Wells that has some of the aspects of a fable. It was serialized from July to December 1901 in Pearson's Magazine before being published as a volume by Methuen. The inspiration for the novel was Wells's glimpse of May Nisbet, the daughter of the Times drama critic, in a bathing suit, when she came to visit at Sandgate, Wells having agreed to pay her school fees after her father's death.[1]

Plot

The intricately narrated story involves a mermaid who comes ashore on the southern coast of England in 1899. Feigning a desire to become part of genteel society, the mermaid's real design is to seduce Chatteris, a man she saw "some years ago" in "the South Seas—near Tonga," who has taken her fancy.[2] This she reveals in a conversation with the narrator's second cousin Melville, a friend of the family who adopts Miss Waters. As a supernatural being, she is unimpressed with the fact that Chatteris is engaged to a Miss Glendower and is trying to make amends for his wastrel youth by entering politics. Chatteris is unable to resist the mermaid's alluring charms, though succumbing means his death.

Themes

Couched in the language of fantasy and romance that blends with light-hearted social satire, The Sea Lady explores serious themes of nature, sex, the imagination, and the ideal in an Edwardian world in which moral restraints are loosening. Wells wrote in Experiment in Autobiography that The Sea Lady reflected his "craving for some lovelier experience than life had yet given me."[3]

In its narrative structure, The Sea Lady plays cleverly with conventions of historical and journalistic research and verification.

See also

References

  1. Michael Sherborne, H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life (Peter Owen, 2010), p. 145.
  2. H.G. Wells, The Sea Lady, Chap. 6, § II.
  3. Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 179.

Further reading

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