The surge of the Sea

The Surge of the Sea is the burning, autobiographical testimony of Sonia de Borodaewsky (1926–1999), the woman who bent History and the French State to her will to become the first officially registered female professional mariner in France. Born in Saigon to an exiled Russian noble, widowed young with five children to feed, she bought her own trawler at Royan and waged a relentless legal war against a three-century-old law barring women from the sea — winning her case in 1963. Crowned with the 1959 Prix Maryse Bastié, this masterpiece of maritime and feminist literature, told in salt-sharp prose, is reborn in an augmented edition prepared by her son, Dominique de Borodaewsky: a true act of transmission and remembrance.