Shirley Kossick
ELECTRICITY by Victoria Glendinning (Hutchinson,
VICTORIA GLENDINNING is an accomplished and highly regarded writer, best known for her authoritative biographies of Rebecca West, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell and Elizabeth Bowen. Her most recent biography — on Anthony Trollope — was published to widespread acclaim in 1992 and re-affirmed her status as a thorough scholar and a writer of subtlety and grace.
Electricity is only Glendinning’s second venture into fiction (The Grown-Ups was published in 1989), but it has all the hallmarks of an experienced novelist. Her development of character, her narrative technique and her treatment of several interwoven themes are all
When she was writing Trollope, Glendinning told an interviewer that she felt she had fallen in love with her subject. Something of this intimacy is carried over into Electricity, which is set in the 1880s, an era Glendinning vividly conjures up.
The story opens when Charlotte, the first-person narrator, is 18. The family — anything but well-off — is awaiting the arrival of their new boarder, Peter Fisher. When the young Peter enters the scene, he literally transforms their lives.
As an electrical engineer he represents change and progress, and his enthusiasm for his exotic occupation is infectious. Unbelievable as it may seem, Glendinning actually succeeds in making the intricacies of the first-time wiring of a big country house exciting and
Electricity of another sort passes between Charlotte and Peter and they soon become engaged. But Charlotte is no ordinary romantic heroine. Unlike her downtrodden mother, she has a strong vein of cynicism in her make- up and views her world without illusion.
When she and Peter “proceeded to fall romantically in love”, for instance, she comments that it was “in order to make our hunger for one another acceptable both to ourselves and to our mothers”. The marriage that follows is seen in juxtaposition with her parents’ arid relationship and later an unorthodox liaison of her
The novel is full of incident — some of it as charged as the electricity which is its binding force — but the main focus is Charlotte herself. Though her marriage is a central event in her life, even more crucial is the dramatic contrast between her simple background and the sophisticated ambience of Morrow Park where her husband goes to work.
As Charlotte develops into a mature and complex being, she encounters the all-too-numerous obstacles and taboos that circumscribe female aspirations. Glendinning avoids the pitfalls of feminist polemic, however, and gives us a highly readable and absorbing novel both of ideas and action.