The House on the Beach: A Realistic Tale is a novella by English novelist George Meredith.
A young woman is forced by conscience to become inappropriately engaged to a far older man, who threatens to reveal the secret that her father was previously a deserter.
Although the novella wasn't written until the late 1870s, Meredith had started the story 15 years prior in Seaford.
[1] He appears to have been inspired to take up the story again after the 1876 Great Flood at Seaford, which forms the novella's dramatic denouement.
[2] The House on the Beach was first published in New Quarterly magazine in January 1877,[1] a magazine in which Meredith also published The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper and The Tale of Chloe, novellas often classified and published with The House on the Beach.