Synopses & Reviews
“Seductive as the tides, it pulls the reader in.” -
Publishers Weekly Two distinguished guests are traveling separately to a ceremony where they will meet for the first time in three decades. Both are apprehensive as they review the successes and failures of their public lives and their shared personal history.
Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman met as children by the gray North Sea to which they are returning. Humphrey was a serious child, drawn to the underwater world of marine biology. For her part, Ailsa could kick and bite like a pony, and she was as brave as a scorpion, qualities that foreshadowed her dazzling transformation into a flamboyant feminist celebrity. Margaret Drabble traces the evolution of their careers and their passionately entangled relationship, and brings them together again to see what they will make of their past and in what spirit they will be able to face the future.
At her acute, witty best, Margaret Drabble examines the ways in which place, chance, and time merge to make us what we are.
Review
"In a novel that goes well beyond love story, Drabble examines the power of memory."
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"A thoroughly enchanting blend of scientific erudition, social satire and domestic comedy from a novelist who continues to surprise us...The genius of [Drabble's] prose is an ability to be incisive and satiric without sticking her characters on the end of a pin the way her older sister, A.S. Byatt, does..."
Publishers Weekly
Review
"In this playful, gently biting, multifaceted story, a self-dramatizing doyenne of gender studies and a reticent marine biologist--both fantastically introspective and self-aware--review salient points of their pasts when they're reunited in the seaside town where they met as children."
Review
"Ailsa is perhaps the most appealing protagonist among the mature and accomplished women Drabble has featured in her numerous earlier novels...Drabble's vivid, mesmerizing sea-life imagery, which pervades her rendering of Humphrey's attraction to the underwater world, is arguably the novel's strongest feature."
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Review
"An intense melancholy pervades the latest novel from the prolific and always thoughtful Drabble...[She] mixes sociology, psychology and philosophy--not to mention marine biology--into what is at heart a bittersweet autumnal romance. Emotionally reflective and intellectually invigorating." (Starred review)
Kirkus Reviews
Review
"In this playful, gently biting, multifaceted story, a self-dramatizing doyenne of gender studies and a reticent marine biologist--both fantastically introspective and self-aware--review salient points of their pasts when theyre reunited in the seaside town where they met as children."
(Atlantic Monthly, Jun 1 2007 )
Review
"In her 18th novel, Margaret Drabble appears to be in her element...The Sea Lady is the work of a quicksilver, fathom-deep intelligence ducking and diving wittily into matters of the head and heart."
Los Angeles Times
Review
"An intense melancholy pervades the latest novel from the prolific and always thoughtful Drabble...[She] mixes sociology, psychology and philosophy--not to mention marine biology--into what is at heart a bittersweet autumnal romance. Emotionally reflective and intellectually invigorating." (Starred review)
(Kirkus Reviews, Jun 1 2007 )
Review
PRAISE FOR MARGARET DRABBLE"Reading Margaret Drabbles novels has become something of a rite of passage . . . Sharply observed, exquisitely companionable tales of women of a certain age and class, educated, egocentric, strong, unlucky in love."THE WASHINGTON POST"As meticulous as Jane Austen, and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh."LOS ANGELES TIMES
Review
"Told from alternating his-and-her perspectives, this is a thought-provoking tale, glinting with elegiac reflections on aging and the power that time, place, and serendipity exert over our destinies."
Review
"There are few pleasures more mentally invigorating than astringently witty and wise satirical fiction. Drabble is a master of the form, creating audacious women characters of withering insight and triumphant sensuality...But for all its dark knowledge, oceanic psychology, and spiny social critique, Drabble's novel is as scintillating as a sunny day onboard a fast-moving sailboat on the life-sustaining sea." (Starred and boxed)
Review
"A salty, satirical novel awash with oceanic metaphors." (summer Books Round-up)
Review
"[Drabble] brilliantly captures both the austerity of live in post-war Britain and a childhood that feels real without being either overly precocious or nostalgic."
Review
"Drabble is adept at lyric metaphor as well as social satire; in Lady, she manages to be both lavish and droll. A-"
Entertainment Weekly
Review
"The language of science mixes with that of religion to produce a holistic, humanistic resolution worthy of that great poet Wordsworth...[Drabble] has created a true thing of beauty."
Martin Rubin
Review
"Drabble's prickly sensibility is in fine form in 'The Sea Lady.'"
Miami Herald
Review
"The bold latest from the ever-inventive Drabble...Nothing as simple as a love story, this prismatic novel shines as a faceted portrait of England's changing mores, as an ode on childhood's joys and injustices, and a primer for marine biology, complete with hermaphrodite crayfish and fossils of sea lilies. Seductive as the tides, it pulls the reader in."
Ms.
Review
PRAISE FOR THE SEA LADY "[A] tour de force . . . With lyrical originality Drabble captures the idealistic, eternally self-absorbed paradoxes of the aging baby-boom generation. The result, like its contradictory protagonists, is as sensual as a moonlit beach, as bracing as an offshore wind."People (4 stars) "A thoroughly enchanting blend of scientific erudition, social satire and domestic comedy from a novelist who continues to surprise us."Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
This is the story of Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman, who spent a summer together as children in Ornemouth, a town by the gray North Sea. As they journey back to Ornemouth to receive honorary degrees from a new university thereHumphrey on the train, Ailsa flyingthey take stock of their lives over the past thirty years, their careers, and their shared personal entanglements. Humphrey is a successful marine biologist, happiest under water, but now retired; Ailsa, scholar and feminist, is celebrated for her pioneering studies of gender and for her gift for lucid and dramatic exposition. The memories of their lives unfold as Margaret Drabble exquisitely details the social life in England in the second half of the last century.
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Advance Praise for
The Sea Lady“It is a pleasure to read The Sea Lady and find again the canny, cagey, unfooled, intransigent author of The Needles Eye…Drabbles generous and unsentimental truthfulness to the condition of childhood is very rare.” -Ursula Le Guin, The Guardian
“[A] dense, fascinating novel…Drabble writes beautifully about the passing of time and the sad, incomplete experience of human love.” -The New Statesman
“But for all its dark knowledge, oceanic psychology, and spiny social critique, Drabbles novel is as scintillating as a sunny day on board a fast-moving sailboat on the life-sustaining sea.” -Booklist (starred)
About the Author
MARGARET DRABBLE is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.