ELECTRICITY

ELECTRICITY Victoria Glendinning (Little, Brown, $22.95) Written with all the snap and crackle of a contemporary coming-of-age novel, Electricity brings to light the Victorian era as a time of scientific discovery, spiritualism, and shifting relations between the sexes. A strong-minded ingenue from an emotionally stunted family, Charlotte Mortimer marries an electrical engineer and moves with him to the English countryside, where he is hired to wire a fancy estate. Her entry into worldly society is both thrilling and humiliating, and electricity is used as a metaphor for the emotional charge -- both negative and positive -- her new life affords. Charlotte is full of self-knowledge, but when men and marriage fail her, she stumbles badly -- and comically -- in her efforts to make it on her own. Glendinning, who won a Whitbread Award for her 1992 biography of Anthony Trollope, has created a quietly feisty heroine in this deftly written, if initially slow-moving, novel. B+