Electricity: A Novel - Softcover

Victoria Glendinning is the award-winning biographer of Elizabeth Bowen, Leonard Woolf, Anthony Trollope, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West and Jonathan Swift. Her novels, The Grown-Ups, Electricity and Flight, were critical and commercial successes. She divides her time between London, Provence and Ireland.

icity 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.