Nicols Fox, a professional reviewer and essayist, writes on a computer and submits her work to editors by e-mail. She is, after all, a citizen of the 21st century. But stop by Ms. Fox's home in Bass Harbor, Maine, and you may see her clothes drying on the line - even in winter. Drop in at night and you might find her reading by candlelight or oil lamp. Television? Well, she has one with rabbit ears, but a layer of dust covers the top.

Ms. Fox is a self-described "neo-Luddite," a reference to Ned Ludd and the early-1800s English rebellion against the Industrial Revolution. Although she has no interest in smashing machines, as angered factory workers once did, she struggles with the paradox of a world in which technology, developed to aid humans, seems to weigh on them more and more.

She has written a book, "Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives" (Island Press/Shearwater Books, $25), which explores the history of resistance to relentless mechanization.

In doing so, she examines not only her own ambivalence about technology but the pressures it can create for all of us to stay abreast of the times.

"What I find is, too much technology is very unpleasant," she says, speaking from her Rue Cottage Books shop in Southwest Harbor, Maine. "If we're having to think all the time if our mechanical screwdriver or cellphone is charged, where the batteries are for this and where the batteries are for that, it's a very stressful life. If we can just get rid of some of these things, we can get rid of stress."

In her book, Fox says that machines and humans are basically incompatible, and that she wanted to chronicle the tradition of resistance to technology.

Like the original Luddites, these resisters may appear to have lost to the mighty machine. Yet she believes opponents have left a trail of solid thinking that deserves to be considered and appreciated.

That trail runs from the 19-century naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, who used a one-room house at Walden Pond outside Boston to commune with nature, to a present-day empathizer like Bill Coperthwaite, director of the Yurt Foundation in Bucks Harbor, Maine, who chooses not to have a telephone and picks up his mail only once a week.

In examining their path and others like them, Fox takes readers on a journey of reflection not unlike the trail she has followed in her own life.

Looking back, she believes the experience of living in her grandparents' log home as a child and observing the simple life they led helped to shape her perspective.

There, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, canning and crafting were commonplace. This setting, along with the warmth of a home with wood-plank floors and a marvelous stone fireplace, brought Fox closer to nature.

In fact, in researching "Against the Machine," Fox has come to realize how much simple, natural pleasures weave their way through so many of her seemingly random daily preferences. When she had to deal with peeling paint on her house, she opted for unfinished cedar shingles, just as she chooses organic bread rather than the prepackaged variety.

For Fox, a personal turning point in her philosophy came in college, when, in an English history class, she first learned of the Luddite Rebellion. Since then, she says, every mention of the word Luddite has made her sit up and listen.

Fox says the essence of Luddism is far from violence. Instead, it is "respect and confidence in those things that make us human. ... It questions the domination of science and the elevation of efficiency to a superior value. It rejects materiality."

Some people, Fox learned, live this philosophy uncompromisingly. She writes about a couple who moved from California to Maine to live alone for 35 years on an island, with no modern conveniences. Just as determinedly, a group called the Benders in England fashion homes of bendable hazel sticks in order to live as lightly as possible on the earth.

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