H G Wells

The Sea Lady H G Wells

The Sea Lady is a fantasy novel by British writer H. G. Wells, including 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. In presenting a creature of legend active in the prosaic contemporary genteel English society, the book clearly falls into the definition of contemporary fantasy, at the time not yet recognized as a distinct sub-genre.