The Seal Woman

Special offer: Beverley Farmer new editions

The portrait of a widow in mourning by Beverley Farmer, one of Australia’s most important writers.

The Seal Woman explores the mind of a middle-aged woman mourning the recent death of her husband at sea, in a cottage lent to her by friends in the seaside village in Victoria where she had spent her honeymoon. The prose in Beverley Farmer’s second novel is marked by the suppleness of its language, and its extraordinary attention to detail. Dagmar’s observations – of the sea and its creatures, the light, the mist, the wind, the life of plants – are so intense and evocative, it is as if she has dissolved into her surroundings. On the other hand, her shyness leaves her vulnerable to the deceit of others, particularly the man she depends on as her lover – and her fascination with world mythology fails to liberate her from the prejudices shaping the society in which she has sought solace. Her retreat into wonder is undercut by a persistent questioning, as to how far it might lead her into a state of submission.

The Seal Woman was originally published in 1992, two years after A Body of Water, an imaginative montage of journal, commonplace book, stories and poems, which it resembles in its own use of mixed sources, from myth and legend and history. In bringing these two books back into print, alongside Farmer’s first work of fiction Alone, and her last books The Bone House and This Water, Giramondo is building on its commitment, not only to this remarkable author, but to the republication of contemporary classics by Australian women authors.

The Seal Woman’s prose is radiant, yet Farmer’s style is aggressive in its pursuit of exacting beauty, a precision arrived at through a labour of attention… Language is put under strain, asked to prove its strength; readers must submit to the writing as if to the sea, to its suck, its power to erode, suspend and sculpt… Working close to the bone, The Seal Woman is a gratifying thing, near to that perfect and pure silence of watching the “head of the sun sink and slowly rise out of the sea”.
Isabella Gullifer-Laurie, The Saturday Paper

Beautiful, aching…one of her wilder books… It’s an Australia seen through an outsider’s eyes, and layered over with other histories, other mythologies, other landscapes and lives.Fiona Wright, Meanjin

An elegant and satisfying novel. Like fine food, good sex, lasting relationships, and memorable music, it takes time to develop and the artistry that sustains it is understated and deceptive. It is, however, memorable. There is the instant gratification of Farmer’s delicate but sensuous prose and a finely woven narrative about a Danish woman, Dagmar… It is the cumulative effect of this virtuoso performance that surprises. Throughout, Farmer maintains a balance between the apparent simplicity of one woman’s exclusive story (with its nuances, modulations and personal significances) and the intricacies of a narrative (a kind of linguistic tessellation) which demonstrates a thesis about the inter-relatedness of our ‘one world’.
Lyn Jacobs, Australian Book Review (1992)

A mesmerising text about loss, the connectedness of all living things… [and] a patient reverence for the continuity of time, rhythm of the seasons, the oceans and, of course, its living creatures.Lyn Chatham, Rochford Street Review