Monsarrat is one of the few who explored, in his fiction, the loss of women’s lives at sea. In The Cruel Sea, his ‘forlorn last try’ to make it as a writer, and the book that subsequently made him a millionaire, one of his characters falls in love with a Wren. The pair’s marriage pledge is thwarted when she is killed after a ferryboat capsizes in a storm, a tentative prodding of his darkest memories of the war at sea.
