The Sea Lady

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 (under the alias "Miss Doris Thalassia Waters"), the mermaid's real design is to seduce Harry 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 the socially-minded Miss Adeline Glendower and is trying to make amends for his wastrel youth by entering politics. With mere words, the mermaid shakes both Chatteris and Melville's faith in their society's norms and expectations, enigmatically telling them that "there are better dreams". In the end, Chatteris is unable to resist her alluring charms, though succumbing supposedly means his death.

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. According to John Clute, "Structurally it is the most complex thing Wells ever wrote, certainly the only novel Wells ever wrote to directly confirm our understanding that he did, indeed, read Henry James."[4] Adam Roberts has argued that The Sea Lady was written in a kind of dialogue with James's The Sacred Fount (1901).[5]

Miss Adeline Glendower, the elder of the Glendower half-sisters, is an avid reader of Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry Ward).[6] Her seaside reading matter is Sir George Tressady[7] and she is compared to the eponymous heroine of Marcella,[8] both novels by Mary Augusta Ward. Marcella (Lady Marcella Maxwell, née Boyce) is a leading character is both novels.

Sarah Grand[9] was a contemporaneous English feminist writer.

• The Lady from the Sea
• The Little Mermaid
• Undine
• Mermaids in popular culture

• Austern, Linda; Naroditskaya, Inna, eds. (2006). Music of the Sirens. Bloomington (Ind.): Indiana University Press. pp. 56–58. ISBN 978-0253218469. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
• Batchelor, John (1985). H. G. Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 62–66. ISBN 978-0521278041. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
• Connes, G. A. (1969). A Dictionary of the Characters and Scenes in the Novels, Romances, and Short Stories of H. G. Wells (Repr. d. Ausg. 1926. ed.). Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press. p. 404. ISBN 978-0838313534. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
• James, Simon J. (2012). Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture. Corby: Oxford University Press. pp. 47–51. ISBN 978-0199606597. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
• McLean, Steven, "'A fantastic, unwholesome little dream': The Illusion of Reality and Sexual Politics in H. G. Wells's The Sea Lady", Papers on Language and Literature, 49 (2013), 70–85.
• Parrinder, Patrick; Partington, John S., eds. (2005). The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe (1st publ. ed.). London: Thoemmes Continuum. ISBN 978-0826462534. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
• Silver, Carole G. (1999). Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-0195144116. Retrieved 8 September 2012.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Sea Lady.

• The Sea Lady at Open Library
• The Sea Lady public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• An essay on The Sea Lady by Adam Roberts