The Devil arrives in fin de siècle London

The setting is London, 1895, and the Devil is on the loose, in the guise of the handsome and charming Prince Lucio Rimânez. 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."

Lucio sets his sights on Geoffrey Tempest, a starving novelist who has just inherited a fortune, and promises to show Geoffrey how best to invest his newfound wealth. As the tragic story of Geoffrey's meteoric rise and fall unfolds, Marie Corelli exposes the hypocrisy and immorality of modern life in this Faustian novel and bestseller of its time.