The Sea Lady - by Margaret Drabble (Paperback)

Book 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 there--Humphrey on the train, Ailsa flying--they 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.

From the Back Cover

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 Needle s Eye Drabble s 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, Drabble s novel is as scintillating as a sunny day on board a fast-moving sailboat on the life-sustaining sea. Booklist (starred)
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Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR MARGARET DRABBLE

"Reading Margaret Drabble's 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 --