![]() ![]() Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: "Una!" Giles' voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. She gets whaling out of her system early: going to sea at 16 disguised as a boy, Una has her ship sunk by her own monstrous whale, and survives a harrowing shipwreck: I was so horrified by the whale's deliberate charge that I could not move. Una, named for the heroine of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, flees to the New England coast from Kentucky to escape her father's puritanism and to pursue a more exalted life. This ambitious novel pays tribute to Melville, creating heroines from his lesser characters, and to America's literary heritage in general. Through the eye of an outsider, a woman, she suggests that New England life was broader and richer than Melville's manly world of men, ships, and whales. Ahab's Wife, Sena Naslund's epic work of historical fiction, honors that aphorism, using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as looking glass into early-19th-century America. ![]() ![]() It has been said that one can see farther only by standing on the shoulders of giants. ![]()
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