The Sea Lady
First edition title page
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| Author | H. G. Wells |
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| Original title | The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Publisher | Methuen |
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Publication date
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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.
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. 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. In the end, Chatteris is unable to resist the mermaid's alluring charms, though succumbing 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."
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."
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