Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture, and: The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (review)"

LaMonaca, Maria "Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture, and: The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (review)"
Victorian Studies - Volume 44, Number 1, Autumn 2001, pp. 153-155
Indiana University Press


Excerpt


"A fairy stirring up the world with a wand dipped in ink." So wrote Robert Hitchens admiringly of Marie Corelli (1855-1924), who in her lifetime became Britain's top-selling novelist and a worldwide celebrity. Corelli and her work stirred up anything but lukewarm responses. Her novels (thirty-one in all) won adoring fans from all ranks of society; Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, and William Gladstone were among her ardent admirers, as were working-class readers who named their baby daughters after Corelli heroines. Corelli's most popular novel, The Sorrows of Satan (1895) is considered the first modern bestseller; it sold more copies upon its initial publication than any previous English novel. By Corelli's death in 1924, Sorrows had gone through sixty reprintings and was adapted for film by D. W. Griffith in 1926. The devotion of Corelli's readers was matched only by the loathing of literary reviewers, who repeatedly lambasted what they regarded as Corelli's pandering to the degraded tastes of the masses. Her books--fascinating hybrids of romance, science fiction, adventure, historical narrative, dream-vision, and sermon-- brimmed with purple prose, revolted against a late-Victorian world marked by uncertainty, turmoil, and change. Corelli gave her readers a world in which men were still dashing heroes, women demure angels, and morality black and white. Yet anything else was possible: Ardath (1889) explores time travel and reincarnation, the protagonist of The Soul of Lilith (1892) practices hypnosis and bodily resurrection, and The Romance of Two Worlds (1886) depicts space travel, eternal youth, and the existence of immortal soulmates. "She aimed directly at the heart of the people," wrote a reviewer shortly after her death, "sentiment and pathos and melodrama [. . .]. Whatever was in her mind came forth with all the turbulence of a river in spate. And the public adored her" (qtd. in Ransom