Thomas Edison, in his laboratory in Menlo Park, is developing an Android—de l’Isle-Adam always capitalizes the word—that he thinks will eventually be manufactured in the thousands, which will replace in the affections of besotted men the unworthy women they have fallen in love with. The Androids can be made to have the exact features and forms of those women. To him in his laboratory comes his old friend Lord Celian Ewald, who once saved Edison’s life. Ewald tells his friend that he has fallen for a woman whom he believed must have a soul to match her stunning beauty—she looks uncannily like the armless Venus Anadyomene in the Louvre. Instead, she turned out to be venal and small-minded, without honor or imagination. Edison sees his friend as the perfect candidate for the first Android. He talks Ewald out of committing suicide for the time being—at least the three weeks it will take him to make his prototype, called Hadaly, into the identical image of Ewald’s Alicia Clary.
Edison tells Ewald the story of his friend, Edward Anderson, who falls for a predatory, and not even very attractive without elaborate makeup, theatre dancer. He gets into money troubles, drinks too much, and ends up leaving a wife and two children when he commits suicide. Edison hopes to stop such waste through “thousands and thousands of marvelous and perfectly innocent facsimiles, who will render wholly superfluous all those beautiful but deceptive mistresses.” The radical nature of Edison’s scientific experiment seems to require a moral purpose. We find out later that Edison helps Anderson’s widow, and in fact she turns out to be his assistant in the creation of Hadaly. Edison takes Ewald down into his underground laboratory and shows him in great detail how he creates the Android to be so like its original as to be indistinguishable. He argues against Ewald’s contention that Hadaly will always be the same and monotonous. Pictures, statues, and books are always the same, he says, but “one discovers every day new beauties in them.” He argues against the wisdom and even the possibility of improvisation in words of love, and for the power of the first moment of realized desire: “perfect repetition is no flaw in love.”
Ewald summons Alicia Clary to Edison’s Menlo Park estate, and Edison poses as an impresario to her, telling her she will be the star of his new production, thereby getting her to rehearse it while he records her voice for hours. Meanwhile, a supposed sculptress, who is really Mrs. Anderson, who has become reborn as “Sowana,” takes minute measurements and photographs of her in order to reproduce them in Hadaly, but telling her they are creating a nude sculpture of her as Eve. On the last day of the three weeks, Edison springs Hadaly on Ewald, pretending it’s Alicia. Ewald is at first horrified and then once again suicidal. Hadaly speaks to him, saying she has come to rescue him, that Edison was only her servant: “I called myself into existence in the thought of him who created me, so that while he thought he was acting of his own accord, he was also deeply, darkly obedient to me.” Most of this, it turns out, is actually Sowana speaking through Hadaly, as we learn later; Sowana has been partly responsible for enlivening Hadaly and giving her a soul. Ewald’s reason, Hadaly argues, is the enemy of his happiness, and eventually he agrees. Edison, however, says he will make no more Androids.
Mrs. Anderson/Sowana dies the night her and Edison’s work is complete. And on the voyage back to England, the chest containing Hadaly is burned up in a fire that destroys the ship, while Alicia clary is lost when her lifeboat capsizes. Ewald, however, survives.
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