Marie Corelli

London, 1895, and the Devil is on the loose. He is searching for someone morally strong enough to resist temptation, but there seems little chance he will succeed. Britain is all but totally corrupt. The aristocracy is financially and spiritually bankrupt; church leaders no longer believe in God; Victorian idealism has been banished from literature and life; and sexual morality is being undermined by the pernicious doctrines of the 'New Woman'. Everything and everyone is up for sale, and it takes a special kind of moral courage to resist the Devil's seductions.

Morgana Royal is an elfin young woman, a multimillionaire heiress and scientist living with her servants on the Sicilian coast, who has invented an airship levitated by a secret new process. Roger Seaton is a penniless scientist living in a hermitage on the mountain behind a California resort, who has invented a weapon that will vaporize any nation that threatens war. The two of them spend most of the book separately musing about the futility of love and marriage, the impossibility of happiness, and the degeneracy of the modern age, until Morgana flies into the airspace of a mythical desert city and sets off the only thin thread of plot this book has.

Popular novel on the theme of reincarnation.