Seetha is one of the early novels of Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), first published in 1923, the same year as Irangani. This is a Sinhala-language edition.
The book has a particular place in Wickramasinghe's development. His second and third novels, Soma and Irangani, were sentimental romances in the popular style of the day and sold out quickly. In his autobiographical writing he set Seetha apart from them: he said he wrote Seetha, Miringu Diya (1925) and the short-story collection Geheniyak (1924) to free himself from writing naive stories, and that through them he shaped a narrative and descriptive style suited to his own experience of Sinhala life. Unlike the two romances before it, Seetha did not sell well, but he wrote that he could not bring himself to return to the earlier pattern.
Critics have read Seetha as a transitional work, in which a more serious theme still sits uneasily inside the conventions of melodrama. The scholar Sarathchandra Wickramasuriya groups it with Wickramasinghe's other novels of the early 1920s, which share a sympathetic interest in the lives and moral worth of women. The author returned to the book decades later, writing a new preface for an edition published in 1959.
Wickramasinghe's novels of the 1920s were followed by a long pause before Gamperaliya (1944), and Seetha shows the first steps towards the realism of that later work. It suits Sinhala readers who want to follow his career in order and to see where his mature style began.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Published: 1923
- Language: Sinhala
