The Grey Lady

A Grey Lady of the sea, a Corsican coast, an English girl with money and the men arranging her life around it. Merriman was Hugh Stowell Scott, a Lloyd's underwriter who used a pen name so the City would not learn he wrote novels, and died at forty-one; he travelled where he set his books, and the Mediterranean here is a working sea, not a holiday. Fifty-eight plates of coastal painting, from Constable to Bonington, track the working sea Merriman's characters sail.