The Tidal Wave

Ethel Dell in short compass: a Cornish fishing village and a wave; men who are brutes and then are not; women who choose them anyway. Her first novel was rejected eight times and then ran through thirty editions — the critics were merciless and the public did not care, and Q. D. Leavis used her as an exhibit in an argument about what the public wanted. Read her to see what that was, and why it worked. Sixty plates of sea painting by Turner, Aivazovsky and others, from calm sunsets to wrecks, run from 1770 to 1898 alongside her waves and the men who survive them.