A deft blending of fact and fiction, A Sudden Music tells the story of Althea Edison Benedict, a young American student in the Paris of 1910, who awakens to the first stirrings of Divine and of human love. This novella, a poetic recreation of the first Baha'i centre in Europe, unfolds against the background of the visit to Paris in 1909 of May Ellis Maxwell, the heart and inspirer of the community she founded there in 1901, depicts the activities of some of the outstanding Baha'is who served there, describes the visit in 1911 of 'Abdu'l-Baha, and evokes the atmosphere of spiritual receptivity - then obtaining and since unequalled - that must foreshadow the eventual capitulation of Europe, wrapped in the darkness of materialism, to the brightening rays of the Revelation of Baha'u'llah."