The Sea Lady

A mermaid comes ashore at a seaside resort, and quietly calls one man toward a deeper, stranger dream.

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About this edition

On a bright August morning, in full sight of the Sandgate villas, a beautiful woman is drawn from the sea, and proves to have a tail. She gives her name as Miss Doris Thalassia Waters, settles among the respectable Buntings, and makes it known she has come ashore for one thing only: Harry Chatteris, a promising young man promised to another.

Into the trim, sunlit respectability of an Edwardian watering-place swims the Sea Lady, beautiful, otherworldly and entirely unconcerned with the rules of polite society. As she draws Harry away from his engagement, his career and the whole bright surface of his life, the question becomes which world is the dream and which the waking.

First published in 1902, The Sea Lady is Wells’s wittiest and most wistful fantasy, written between the scientific romances of his youth and the social novels that followed. Beneath its comedy of manners runs one unhurried question, whether a safe, creditable life is worth more than the unattainable thing that calls across the water, which Wells lets hang, glittering and unanswered, as a tissue of moonshine. With the original illustrations by Lewis Baumer, bound behind an original painting.

Details

• H. G. Wells (1866–1946), illustrated by Lewis Baumer
• The complete 1902 novel with the first illustrated edition’s plates
• Solocosmo Press
• The Lightbound Library
• Paperback and hardcover, 6 × 9, 152 pages