| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Sea Lady for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
A pleasure to read . . . utterly engrossing (Guardian )
'The Sea Lady proves [Drabble] remains one of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around.' FT magazine
Drabble excels at describing the minute detail of human behaviour…The Sea Lady is a potent tribute to lost dreams and harsh realities. (The Independent )
An intelligent, full-bodied, big-hearted book (Daily Mail )
'The Sea Lady proves [Drabble] remains one of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around.' FT magazine
Drabble excels at describing the minute detail of human behaviour…The Sea Lady is a potent tribute to lost dreams and harsh realities. (The Independent )
An intelligent, full-bodied, big-hearted book (Daily Mail )
Product Description
Humphrey and Ailsa meet as children by a grey, northern sea. Humphrey is quiet, serious - and will in time explore the sea's mysteries; Ailsa is angry, a freckled cobra ready to strike. Yet they fascinate one another and when they meet again years later they fall briefly - and disastrously - in love.
Half a lifetime passes before Humphrey and Ailsa's paths finally re-cross. What will each make of their past? And of the future?
The Sea Lady tells the a story of first and last love, of evolution and the ebb and flow of time that gives shape to our lives.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
43 of 44 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
For some reason I seem lately to have been reading several novels about aging, depressed, and lonely academics or members of the media or arts community--E.g. Shroud, by Banville; Amsterdam by McEwan, and A Foreign Affair by Lurie, among others. The Sea Lady is another and one of the best of this flourishing genre. As in The Sea Lady the protagonists seem always to be highly successful (unlike most of us real aging academics reading or writing amazon reviews), very depressed about their miserable lives (but it's not always clear why and sometimes seems self-indulgent), are divorced or in any case alone and lonely (but many of us real retired academics are still married, with rafts of grand children), and are almost obsessively self-involved (aren't we all? Or perhaps I should just speak for myself here).
The Sea Lady is the compressed life story of several children who meet one or two summers shortly after World War II on the seashore of England near the border with Scotland on the North Sea. Two, Ailsa and Humphrey, meet later in life, fall in love and marry, divorce, etc. Then meet again in their sixties, etc., etc. All the children turn out to be famous or wealthy as adults; all are successful, miserable, lonely, aging or aged now in 2006 (the story is told seamlessly with flashbacks). Drabble is a fine writer with a sensitive simple style that is very similar to Ian McEwan's but without the twisted, dark tones of McEwan. Although nothing happens in the novel, there is no violence, little lurid sex, or anything else of moment, I found it gripping and enjoyable. This is life, a mirror for us aging academics. Even if we're not successful or miserable and lonely there is much in this novel that illuminates and perhaps quiets our own demons.
Some of the things I very much liked about The Sea Lady: Drabble manages to weave a lot of trivia about life in England since WW II into her narrative. This novel evoked England for me better than many others that I've read lately (I'm a confirmed anglophile--I live in New York). Also Drabble uses quotes and snippets from Shakespeare in a creative and charming way that enhances the story. (I'm also a life-long Shakespeare fan.)
I must say that I am amazed by Drabble's talent. I wonder how she can breathe such life, such intensity into her story and characters. I admire and wonder at this talent, this genius. As with other fine writers, I wonder how they can know so much, sense so many things and get them on the page and make them live off the page. This is the first of Drabble's novels that I have read and I came upon it by accident, but I plan to read more of her works. Congratulations!
The Sea Lady is the compressed life story of several children who meet one or two summers shortly after World War II on the seashore of England near the border with Scotland on the North Sea. Two, Ailsa and Humphrey, meet later in life, fall in love and marry, divorce, etc. Then meet again in their sixties, etc., etc. All the children turn out to be famous or wealthy as adults; all are successful, miserable, lonely, aging or aged now in 2006 (the story is told seamlessly with flashbacks). Drabble is a fine writer with a sensitive simple style that is very similar to Ian McEwan's but without the twisted, dark tones of McEwan. Although nothing happens in the novel, there is no violence, little lurid sex, or anything else of moment, I found it gripping and enjoyable. This is life, a mirror for us aging academics. Even if we're not successful or miserable and lonely there is much in this novel that illuminates and perhaps quiets our own demons.
Some of the things I very much liked about The Sea Lady: Drabble manages to weave a lot of trivia about life in England since WW II into her narrative. This novel evoked England for me better than many others that I've read lately (I'm a confirmed anglophile--I live in New York). Also Drabble uses quotes and snippets from Shakespeare in a creative and charming way that enhances the story. (I'm also a life-long Shakespeare fan.)
I must say that I am amazed by Drabble's talent. I wonder how she can breathe such life, such intensity into her story and characters. I admire and wonder at this talent, this genius. As with other fine writers, I wonder how they can know so much, sense so many things and get them on the page and make them live off the page. This is the first of Drabble's novels that I have read and I came upon it by accident, but I plan to read more of her works. Congratulations!
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman met briefly as children in north-east England. They later meet up as lovers and embark on a short unfortunate marriage. Both have gone on to eke out very different careers. Ailsa has made a name for herself through her academic work on feminism and then through media appearances. She scandalized people by putatively wearing a foetus as a pendant. Humphrey has had a fairly successful career as a marine biologist albeit not without disappointments. At the Green Grotto (in the white elephant at Greenwich) which he had a part in setting up is a robotic mermaid who moves in and out of the water. His embarrassment at this as he escorts his grandson is almost tangible.
Their stories unfold as they travel back to Ornemouth fifty years later to receive honorary doctorates at one of the country's newer universities.
The book is a wonderful evocation of childhood at the seaside as well as the anxieties and uncertainties of ageing. There are constant references to sea life and marine biology (Ailsa's name, her mermaid-like dress, their journey compared to salmon coming home to spawn)
A grown-up book for grown-ups!
Their stories unfold as they travel back to Ornemouth fifty years later to receive honorary doctorates at one of the country's newer universities.
The book is a wonderful evocation of childhood at the seaside as well as the anxieties and uncertainties of ageing. There are constant references to sea life and marine biology (Ailsa's name, her mermaid-like dress, their journey compared to salmon coming home to spawn)
A grown-up book for grown-ups!
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Margaret Drabble's latest novel chronicles a journey - or rather two journeys which are set to converge, with surprising results. Briefly and unsuccessfully married thirty years before, ageing experts Ailsa Kelman and Humphrey Clark are making separate trips north to a provincial town where they are both to receive honorary degrees. Although they appear to come from quite different worlds - Ailsa the wildly controversial academic and feminist pundit, Humphrey the quietly distinguished marine biologist - they once shared an emotional language which both have now almost forgotten how to speak.
As they make their separate pilgrimages towards the scene of a first idyllic childhood summer, Drabble takes us back through time to revisit each reminiscence and regret, chronicling the progress of the couple's strangely unfulfilled relationship. She is excellent when evoking memory, and every detail - from the "tarry masculine seafaring smell of creosote" to the "heathery blend of colours" on a tweedy aunt's sensible suit - evokes a vanished English world with aching veracity.
Drabble links personality with myth throughout the novel, in almost overwhelming fashion. Sea Lady Ailsa, named after an island in the Firth of Clyde, is first revealed dressed in "silver sequinned scales", and the ageing Humphrey recalls how salmon return to the spawning grounds - "the source" - at the end of their lives. Ailsa's life has been glamorous but ultimately lonely, like that of the animatronic mermaid Humphrey watches mechanically circling a grotto pool in a civic aquarium. There's a lot of Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Mermaid" in Ailsa; despite her strident feminism and varied career, and although she has long since given up the "high knife heels" she once wore, there is still a sense that she is a fish out of water, a beached and crippled mermaid looking for her destiny in an indifferent world.
Humphrey is also a disappointed man, forced to forgo fame by his refusal to compete for funding and recognition at the expense of serious science. The Green Grotto, home of the robotic mermaid, is the all too tangible symbol of his failure; conceived as a research establishment and teaching facility, it's become no more than an expensive tourist sideshow. It's also a fairly obvious sideswipe at the dumbing down of modern science teaching and the great White Elephant of Greenwich.
The slow convergence of these disparate lovers is controlled and overseen by the mysterious "Public Orator", a metafictional narrative device which seems unsatisfactory for most of the novel's length. He makes sense only at the novel's denouement, once he is able to step into the action - though he remains a shadowy and somewhat insubstantial figure to the end. Much more satisfying is the sense we have (the novel is subtitled A Late Romance) that in returning to the source, perhaps the Sea Lady might be about to find her true element at last.
first published at subba-cultcha.com
As they make their separate pilgrimages towards the scene of a first idyllic childhood summer, Drabble takes us back through time to revisit each reminiscence and regret, chronicling the progress of the couple's strangely unfulfilled relationship. She is excellent when evoking memory, and every detail - from the "tarry masculine seafaring smell of creosote" to the "heathery blend of colours" on a tweedy aunt's sensible suit - evokes a vanished English world with aching veracity.
Drabble links personality with myth throughout the novel, in almost overwhelming fashion. Sea Lady Ailsa, named after an island in the Firth of Clyde, is first revealed dressed in "silver sequinned scales", and the ageing Humphrey recalls how salmon return to the spawning grounds - "the source" - at the end of their lives. Ailsa's life has been glamorous but ultimately lonely, like that of the animatronic mermaid Humphrey watches mechanically circling a grotto pool in a civic aquarium. There's a lot of Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Mermaid" in Ailsa; despite her strident feminism and varied career, and although she has long since given up the "high knife heels" she once wore, there is still a sense that she is a fish out of water, a beached and crippled mermaid looking for her destiny in an indifferent world.
Humphrey is also a disappointed man, forced to forgo fame by his refusal to compete for funding and recognition at the expense of serious science. The Green Grotto, home of the robotic mermaid, is the all too tangible symbol of his failure; conceived as a research establishment and teaching facility, it's become no more than an expensive tourist sideshow. It's also a fairly obvious sideswipe at the dumbing down of modern science teaching and the great White Elephant of Greenwich.
The slow convergence of these disparate lovers is controlled and overseen by the mysterious "Public Orator", a metafictional narrative device which seems unsatisfactory for most of the novel's length. He makes sense only at the novel's denouement, once he is able to step into the action - though he remains a shadowy and somewhat insubstantial figure to the end. Much more satisfying is the sense we have (the novel is subtitled A Late Romance) that in returning to the source, perhaps the Sea Lady might be about to find her true element at last.
first published at subba-cultcha.com
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
a book with life-changing impact
It happens very seldom when I finish a book that I find myself violently jealous of the writer, because I would so much have liked to write the book myself. Read more
Published 22 months ago by M. Fahrenfort
No.
The story is a bit slow but I'm happy to put up with that. What I could not abide at all was the appearance, if rarely, of The Public Orator, a sort of author's voice. Read more
Published on 15 Sep 2009 by Mrs. A. M. J. Wigmore
Disappointed
I have been a great fan of Margaret Drabble for many years and have read all her other books. I could not wait to read this one. Read more
Published on 4 Oct 2007 by Mary Queen
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
