H.G. Wells

[179] pp.

1934

Sixth Edition

Methuen & Co. Ltd.

7″ x 4.75″

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 or even urban fantasy, at the time not yet recognized as a distinct subgenre.