Electricity: A Novel - Couverture souple

Electricity is a fast-paced novel, both funny and moving, about connections, contacts and shocks--electrical, emotional, sexual, intellectual.

It is the story of a spirited young woman's adventures in the 1880's, recounted by herself with wit, candour and an intimacy of closely ovserved domestic and technical detail.

Charlotte escapes from her narrow, high-tension home in a London suburb into marriage with a young electrician.  In the country mansion which her husband is wiring for electric light--at the time a mysterious, almost magical process--she forms a dangerous liaison with the master of the house.

Electricity is also about choices--science versus religion, spiritualism or rationalism, gas or electricity.  Each person Charlotte encounters has his or her own "language" of power and through it all speaks the unstable, unreliable language of love.

Charlotte Mortimer, brought up in the narrow confines and high tensions of a London suburb, escapes from a world bound by strict conventions into one on the brink of change. She marries Peter Fisher, a fiery young prophet of the new science of electricity. But, in the country mansion which her new husband is wiring for electric light, she forms a liaison with the irresistible master of the house. Sensual, spirited, trapped once again, Charlotte struggles to find her way through the choices pressing upon her.