Alice Mary Gordon

Alice Mary Gordon (22 October 1854 – 18 June 1929) was a British author and writer on the aesthetics of domestic electricity. as well as Alice Butcher, Mrs John Butcher and Lady Danesfort. Her father was in the Indian Civil Service, finishing his career as a Member of the Legislative Council for India and later serving as a Justice of the Peace in Middlesex. She was their only child. They had three children, Dorothy Frances, Peter Christian and James Geoffrey Gordon. It was through collaborating with her husband that she became interested in electricity. James Gordon had studied this topic at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under James Clerk Maxwell, and the couple's first marital home in Dorking was adapted to extend such work.

When they moved to London, their home became a kind of salon for those of a technical mind with an interest in developing the uses of electricity and they moved in well-connected social circles; in 1882 Mrs Gordon was presented to Queen Victoria. presented electricity as an enjoyable luxury illuminant for the wealthy elite; Gordon thus emphasised how carefully-applied decorative techniques could ensure that the often clinical qualities of early incandescent electrical lighting could be shielded from tired eyes.

In the same year, her approach of melding interior decoration with the new lighting opportunities led to a book Decorative Electricity (1891), for which she assumed the title of Mrs J.E.H. Gordon. She was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, and maintained a close correspondence with George Meredith until his death in 1909. In 1919, she wrote a memoir of Meredith, detailing their friendship and his influence on her literary career.