Nedra

Nedra is a novel by the American writer George Barr McCutcheon, published in 1905 by Grosset and Dunlap with illustrations in the style of the period.

The book begins as a comedy of manners among well-off English passengers making a long sea voyage, several of them already engaged to be married to each other. The wreck leaves only two of them alive and ashore on an island in the Pacific that the people living there call Nedra, and the rest of the novel is about what the two of them do with the situation they are in, which includes a marriage that exists in England and a set of obligations no longer enforceable. McCutcheon wrote popular fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century and this one belongs to the tradition of the shipwreck romance, in which the sea removes the social arrangements the characters had been living under and the plot examines what is left. The book was illustrated in the fashionable style of the day and sold as an illustrated novel.

McCutcheon's best known book was Brewster's Millions, published three years before this one, and he wrote a long series of novels for the popular market.