Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century

By Anthem Press

With the purpose of introducing Marie Corelli to a new generation of readers and of reconsidering her works for generations familiar with them, ‘Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century’ demonstrates how provocative Corelli was as a public figure and how controversial and paradoxical were the views about womanhood and the supernatural pitched in her novels. This collection of original essays focuses on three major battles that engaged Corelli: her personal and public contentions, her mercurial constructions of gender and resistance to the New Woman modality and her untenable reconciliation of science with the supernatural. Corelli was often fighting several fronts at the same time; she rarely was not at war with someone including herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089451

Book preview

Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century

Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century

Edited by

Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2019 Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-943-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-943-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Dedicated to our dads,

Charles L. Ayres (1926–2018)

and

Patrick F. X. Maier, the best Gido ever

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Chronology

List of Abbreviations

List of Contributors

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1Portrait of Marie Corelli

1.2Study at Mason Croft, Stratford-upon-Avon

1.3Mason Croft, Stratford-upon-Avon

1.4The back of Mason Croft, Stratford-upon-Avon

1.5Church Street, Stratford-upon-Avon

1.6Marie Corelli on a yacht

1.7Marie Corelli at a fête

1.8Marie Corelli Memorial, Stratford-upon-Avon

CHRONOLOGY

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

Once upon a time, Marie Corelli was the most popular, and bestselling, writer in the world. In England she was just as well known as Charles Dickens, according to one of her biographers, George Bullock (117).¹ Another biographer claimed that while Queen Victoria was alive, Corelli was the second most famous Englishwoman in the world (Masters 6). More than half of her 30 novels soldover 100,000 copies each year (Casey 163), a record that outpaces Hall Caine’s annual sales of 45,000, Mrs. Humphry Ward’s 35,000 and H. G. Wells’ 15,000 (Masters 6). Her sales exceeded those of Rudyard Kipling’s, Arthur Conan Doyle’s and H. G. Wells’ combined (Casey 163). So popular were her books and her mystique, one cynic complained about the Corelli Cult (Stuart-Young 680). Women flocked to her and actually fought over each other to get near her and tried to kiss the hem of her dress (Masters 7). In the United States a new church was formed to practice the Electric Creed described in A Romance of Two Worlds,² and a town in Colorado was called Corelli City (94).

Marie Corelli began her life as Mary Mills; with no existing birth certificate, she is believed to have been born on May 1, 1855, in London to Mary Elizabeth (Ellen) Mills, the mistress of Charles Mackay (Ransom 11; Federico, Idol 4). Author, poet and literary editor for the Illustrated London News, Mackay was a married man (to Rose Henrietta Vale) and father of four other children. Little Mary Mills was told he was her stepfather—his absence from her life was constant until the death of his wife and the marriage of her biological parents in 1861, at which point she becomes Mary Mackay but is known as Minnie (Ransom 11; Federico, Idol 7).

Living in the country at Fern Dell of Box Hill was a challenge for the young girl. No formal education was available other than the accomplishments provided by a governess, but Minnie seemed to yearn for knowledge because, as she said, I instinctively did all I could to make myself a personality to be reckoned with. For this reason I devoured books whatever their qualities, and fed my brains with the thoughts of dead men (quoted in Vyver 20) all the while the many books I did pore over with untiring patience learning all I could, and craving to be taught more. I was indeed a very lonely child, so for this reason I had found my best pleasure in books and music (29). Unlimited possibilities were available in an "olla-podrida of random things, good, bad and indifferent—there were ‘standard’ histories and classics, poets, novelists, and dramatists; there were many volumes of old forgotten essays, and political ‘squibs.’ Voltaire jostled with Plutarch, and Shakespeare with The Tatler and Rambler—and a large number of dictionaries, old and new lumbered the shelves" (19). Although Minnie was able to attend a convent school in Paris, her later work demonstrated the impact her early readings would have on her own multifaceted writing.

Between 1874 and 1886 Minnie made her first attempts to publish; she sent a poem, Sappho, to Mr. Blackwood at Blackwood’s Magazine under the first of her pseudonyms,Vivian Erle Clifford, and with the first of her personal histories as a constant contributor to St James Magazine; masked or not, there was no answer to her inquiry the first time, nor the second time when she framed her address as The Laurels, Belsize Park, the actual address of the Van der Vyvers (Blackwood Papers, MS 4322). Minnie continued to try her hand until she was drawn back to her insistent circumstances: her mother was gravely ill with a malignant disease of the intestine.³

The loneliness Minnie had spoken of was soon to end. Introduced years earlier to Bertha, one of the daughters of the Countess Van der Vyver, Minnie could not even now know that the two women would spend the rest of their lives together. Bertha joined the family and cared for Minnie, and her mother, until Ellen Mackay’s death on February 2, 1876, but then she never left (Ransom 22). Throughout the rest of their lives until Minnie’s death, the two women were constant life companions. Trials of patience were caused by the return from Italy of her half-brother, George Eric Mackay, when their father had a stroke in 1883. The two women discussed the matter and agreed to risk it—not very wisely—for it only added new difficulties and many troubles (quoted in Vyver 146) to their lives because Eric had no profession, no ambition and no interest in helping to support the household. Through early attempts at making a living with piano concerts of musical improvisation to her first attempts at becoming a writer, Minnie and Bertha stood fast together (Ransom 23–24).

Once the women realized Minnie’s best chance was to write, she said, I was desperate, and it was then I decided to a romance […]. And so I wrote with all the speed I could, and one day I thrilled with great joy for the book was done (Ransom 28) and sent on to George Bentley. The contract for the triple-decker novel A Romance of Two Worlds was signed on September 5, 1885, and published on February 18, 1886. Savvy of the desire of the public for a dash of exoticism, she invents another pseudonym, the youthful Signorina Marie Corelli,⁴ which was ultimately shortened to the nom de plume from behind which Minnie—now Marie Corelli—would make her reputation and her fortune. At the height of her popularity, her books were in vogue with the royals. After reading Romance borrowed from the dowager duchess of Roxburghe, Queen Victoria requested that she receive a copy of all future works by Corelli (Rappaport 103); further, the queen telegrammed Corelli her appreciation for Romance (Adcock 60). Corelli’s books were acclaimed by the empress of Austria, the last empress of Russia (Alexandra), Princess Louise of Holland (Waller 804), the queen of Romania (Lawrence 24), Empress Frederick of Germany, the king and queen of Italy and later King Edward (Adcock 60). The empress of Austria asked for the novelist’s portrait and had her secretary write to Corelli: Your books have afforded Her Majesty many hours of happiness and rest. She not only admires your talent and style of writing, but also the poetical imagination with which your works overflow (quoted in Adcock 60). Corelli was the only novelist invited to attend the coronation of Edward VII (Bullock 103–4) and the first woman permitted to lecture at the Royal Society of Literature (143).

Corelli’s fame extended internationally. By 1909 there were over 600 translations of her books (Adcock 60) including German, Dutch, Sweden, Spanish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Russian, Estonian, Thai, Hindi, Urdu and Marathi (Kuehn, Glorious 13). The novel was translated into every known language, even into Persian and Hindustani, and the thinkers and philosophers of the East [held] her in high honour as one who [was] inspired with the truths of the divine (Stead, Marie 41).

Corelli became a favorite with the Russians when a translator of the 1902 edition of Dracula credited her as the author instead of Bram Stoker. The 1904 Russian edition listed Bram Stoker as the author but a librarian in St. Petersburg penciled in that Bram Stoker was a pseudonym for Marie Corelli (Berni 45–58). To this day no one knows how the confusion came about and if Corelli ever heard about it; however, in comparing Dracula with Corelli’s novels, one will find similarities, particularly in her belief that the soul never dies and comes back to inhabit other bodies, both human and nonhuman. In addition, the relationship between Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra is consonant with Corelli’s belief in same-sex soul mates. Finally, the way Dracula controls Mina mirrors the control that Santoris has over the nameless narrator in Corelli’s The Life Everlasting. Simone Berni has noted that in Stoker’s time, the most famous and appreciated ‘gothic’ author, at least as far as English language was concerned, was a woman, Mary Mackay, mostly known as Marie Corelli (47); indeed, one must wonder if Stoker had read Corelli and was inspired by her to create his gothic novels.

Corelli definitely influenced numerous authors in their writing and was credited for it. R. Brandon Kershner identified where and how James Joyce emulated her style in his Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.⁵ The short story writer V. S. Pritchett listed Corelli as one of the novelists whose work he read as a young man (Baldwin 5), even though he would later say that her political opinions about education, libraries and the common people were extremely offensive to him (Pritchett 201–2). In a letter to a friend, George Orwell admitted that he had read Thelma and decided that Corelli was not so absolutely bad.⁶ Oscar Wilde told Corelli that he had read Romance more than once and commented directly to her that You certainly tell of marvellous things in a marvellous way (quoted in Vyver 59), while Alfred, Lord Tennyson praised Ardath as a remarkable work, and a truly powerful creation.⁷ Corelli biographer Annette Federico has noted several other writers who referred to her works, such as Betty Smith (in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), William Stuart Scott and Willa Cather (Idol 9). Mulk Raj Anand and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, two novelists in British India, also acknowledged Corelli’s effect on their writing careers (Bhattacharya, Reception 221–23).

One reason for her renown was that Corelli was a provocateur; in fact, her obituary in the Evening Standard of April 21, 1924, hailed her as having been the greatest literary ‘protester’ (quoted in Vyver 81). Her protests were diverse and controversial in subject. They were blatant, often acerbic and always sincerely passionate about the issues she championed. Queenie Leavis once said that Corelli resolutely tackles them, and, on the other hand, so absurdly out of proportion is the energy expended to the object that aroused it (for instance, in Marie Corelli’s novels, female smoking and low-cut gowns) (66). Applauding her zeal and especially her wholesale contempt for ‘brainless aristocrats’ and ‘wealthy noodles,’ the Dundee Advertiser commended The Sorrows of Satan as

probably the most outspoken book ever presented to the British public […] There are very few fads, foibles, faults, and vices of modern society that the author has not shown up […] Nothing has escaped her denunciations, from mercenary marriages to gourmandising bishops. But the worship of money, the New Woman, and the vile fiction of recent years come in for her heaviest attacks.⁸

She was indomitable, adroit and ardent in wielding her pen that was kept as sharp as any two-edged sword. Corelli campaigned against alcohol as well as drug abuse and urged temperance. In 1890 she published Wormwood, a Drama of Paris, in which she depicted the horrors of chemical addiction particularly with absinthe. In 1900 she published Boy about the abuse a child suffered because of drunken parents, and eight years later published Holy Orders, which attacked the evils of drinking fostered by evil brewers and laid the blame on lax church leaders. Biographer Brian Masters credited Wormwood with swaying Switzerland to pass strict legislation about alcohol consumption, and France to bring the use of absinthe under control in 1909 (108).

Corelli denounced the political suffragists and the bicycled, banged and bloomered New Woman for their lack of femininity until she changed her mind about them much later in life. Her criticism often took the form of diatribes and sermons that ran for pages in some of her novels, but none so much as in My Wonderful Wife!⁹ Its long-suffering, downcast, disillusioned, emasculated husband bemoans that his wife is aping the manners, customs, and slang parlance of men (30). Corelli uses him as a mouthpiece to say to the nation: believe me, no good can come of this throwing down of the barriers between the sexes; no advantage can possibly accrue to a great nation like ours from allowing the women to deliberately sacrifice their delicacy and reserve, and the men to resign their ancient code of chivalry and reverence! (30). When women voluntarily resign her position as the silent monitors and models of grace and purity, Corelli further warns, down will go all pillars of society and England will become as barbaric as other countries (38–39).

Even though Corelli was much in the public limelight and led multiple public and political campaigns, she insisted that all other women should not take an active role in public affairs and/or politics. She felt that women could and should use their feminine influence to persuade men to stay to the straight (or biblically, the strait) and narrow when making, following and enforcing laws for the country. Her perspective was that women were the moral guardians of England. If they were to engage directly in business and politics and imitate men in those arenas, then they would become like men who even at their best, have vile animal passions, low desires, and vulgar vices (30). Giving the vote to women would destroy the only remaining bastion of morality in England: the feminine woman.

These sentiments pervaded numerous pamphlets, tracts and articles that she published. In 1907 she wrote a pamphlet for the Anti-Suffrage League titled Woman or—Suffragette? and an article for Harper’s Bazaar titled Man’s War Against Woman. She satirized those suffragettes as men-women that were masculine in their dress, smoking, career choice, behavior and abandonment of domestic duties at the hearth. Even though she often preached that women should suffer in silence, submitting themselves to the men in their lives and not compete with men in the work force or in the political sphere, time and time again her novels conveyed male treachery and women who remained within their domestic sphere as constantly being betrayed, abused and destroyed. Not one of her books lacks a maligned woman. Corelli herself was constantly beset by vicious men of the press and male leaders in her town of Stratford who impugned her writing, her personality and above all, her physical appearance. She was barely four feet tall with a normal torso but short legs, and often dressed as if she were a young girl even when she was in her fifties; unfortunately, and unfairly, both factors were often lampooned (Federico, Idol 6; Bullock 32 and 209; Bigland 226; Rappaport 104). Her own brother, Eric, professionally exploited her and robbed her of money, as well as publicly ridiculed her, despite her consistent efforts to buoy his floundering literary career (Ransom 48 and 88–89). In her novels, Corelli retaliated; Temporal Power takes on hostile male critics as do The Sorrows of Satan and The Master-Christian in which she regards them as a patriarchal group threatened by the genius of a woman. In 1919, after years of learning about women who were physically and psychologically abused by patriarchal tyrants in their life, the latter being part of her own experience, and after discovering what women were truly capable of doing during the First World War when the men were at war, she wrote a tract titled Is All Well with England? which recanted her earlier position on women’s suffrage and launched her fervid support for the vote for women.

Above all and consistently throughout her life and her canon, Corelli was disturbed about the spiritual condition of her day. Her books often censured the Church, especially priests,Protestant clergy and hypocritical religious people,¹⁰ because, like many of her readers, she agreed that loss of faith and the lack of Christian leadership were at the bottom of all that was wrong with the modern world. Julia Kuehn has defined Corelli’s moralizing ambition as to counteract the agnostic tendencies of the time (20). Her evangelistic zeal and effect are evident in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Hero in which he limns a scene at a tea party with Corelli as the main topic of discussion. Mr. Dryland has just lent Mary a copy of The Master-Christian, remarking that Corelli is the only really great novelist we have in England now. A man of taste and authority, so that his literary judgements could always be relied upon, he says, I’m wasting my time when I read most novels, but I never feel that with Marie Corelli. A vicar at the party pays Corelli a high compliment in suggesting No one would think she was a woman. He later advises every Christian to read Barabbas because it gives an entirely new view of Christ. It puts the incidents of the Gospel in a way that one had never dreamed. Mary concurs and credits the book for making her feel so much better and nobler and more truly Christian. They collectively deplore how the newspapers sneer at her, but then the tea drinkers put her in good company with other persecuted writers like Keats, Shelley and Shakespeare. Mary’s mother does not agree that Corelli has genius and considers her vulgar and blasphemous, but then Mary says that she has always been shocked by her mother’s illiterate gaucherie (97–100).

The sweeping changes endemic of modernity engendered major concerns for Corelli and her readers. The deplorable conditions throughout the nineteenth century that had resulted from the loss of a country life to one of radical urbanization and industrialization epitomized what was negative about the modern world¹¹; however, Corelli learned firsthand that British country living was no rustic Elysium. For the last 25 years of her life while residing in Shakespeare’s town, she was treated with derision, persecuted and libeled by the citizens of Stratford. At one time several townspeople reported her to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for riding in a cart with big Bertha¹² pulled by two little ponies (quoted in Masters 175). One of the most acrimonious battles in Stratford was fought over tearing down five cottages next to Shakespeare’s birthplace to build a library with funds donated by Andrew Carnegie. Corelli argued that the Shakespearean cottages were integral to the preservation of Henley Street as a historical and sacred site in honor of the great bard and was thus a national heritage. Regardless of the controversy at hand, Corelli’s detractors attacked her instead of debating the issues. A member of the clergy, for example, scoffed at Mason Croft, her house, calling it an Earl’s Court tea kiosk, as he flouted Corelli’s illegitimate birth and low education (quoted in Ransom 128).

Undeterred, Corelli continued to combat the deterioration of ethics, morality and faith that she saw all about her at the fin de siècle. Besides laced with astringent satire, her stories often sought to transport her readers out of what she perceived to be a degenerate, temporal and materialistic world, into exotic, timeless and spiritual realms that could transform their behavior and perspectives while yet still in their physical lives. She affirmed the value of faith in all her novels, but the most dramatic declaration of the assurance she had of the spiritual is found in her theosophical novels, and they fed a generation or two of readers who desperately needed to believe in a power greater than themselves.

With the purpose of introducing Marie Corelli to a new generation of readers and of reconsidering her works for those generations familiar with them, Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century demonstrates how provocative Corelli was as a public figure and how controversial and paradoxical were the views about womanhood and the supernatural pitched in her novels. This collection of original essays focuses on three major battles that engaged Corelli: her personal and public contentions (primarily Chapters 1 through 3), her mercurial constructions of gender and resistance to the New Woman modality (primarily Chapters 4 through 8) and her untenable reconciliation of science with the supernatural (Chapter 9 and 10). Corelli was often fighting several fronts at the same time; she rarely was not at war with someone including herself.

The first three chapters foreground the writer rather than Corelli’s work. Corelli was quite contentious and seemed to be deployed in multiple skirmishes throughout her writing career. The first chapter has been written by Nick Leigh Birch who, as the curator of Mason Croft, Corelli’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon, offers unique details and stories about Corelli from the perceptions documented and passed down from the local townspeople. Corelli first visited Stratford in 1890 to pay homage to the town’s great bard. She returned in 1899 at the height of her fame and soon let the town know that she had decided to stay for good. Local residents did not know what to make of her; those who met her were often disarmed by her charm, but she soon developed a reputation for unwelcomed meddling in the town’s affairs. Corelli felt that her immense success and huge readership qualified her to comment on any issue worthy of her