Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marie Corelli
-
Standard Name: Corelli, Marie
Birth Name: Mary Mackay
Nickname: Minnie
Pseudonym: Marie Corelli
MC
was one of the first authors of the modern best seller. She published thirty-one popular novels, including one, published posthumously, which fictionalizes events from her own life. She also wrote short stories (collected in four volumes). She wrote poetry as a child and published a collection of poems posthumously. Her novels have been seen as blending the conventions of the romance, gothic, historical, and society novels. At the turn of the century, sales of each of her novels were in the range of 175,000 copies; at the end of world war one her fame and sales fell drastically. She was the first woman to lecture before the Royal Society of Literature
: The Signs of the Times was presented on 20 February 1902.
She enjoyed going to and hosting prominent literary and social receptions. Her guests included a wide range of people: popular writers such as Rudyard Kipling
, Marie Corelli
, and Frank Harris
; luminaries of...
In spite of the fact that her family did not value literature as much as games, and that her mother had specific ideas about what girls should read, EN
devoured every book she could get...
Literary responses
Ouida
Ouida
was hailed as a woman of genius. Not Talent, merely, but Genius in a Belgravia article by Marie Corelli
.
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Gale Research.
43: 355
Literary responses
Ouida
The Athenæum criticized this novel for mock eloquence
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2016 (16 June 1866): 797
and thought anyone choosing to read it was making a very bad use of their freedom.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2016 (16 June 1866): 798
In...
Textual Features
Julia Pardoe
Indebted to the tradition of Goethe
's Faust, the story may have influenced Marie Corelli
's Sorrows of Satan (1895).
Literary responses
Barbara Pym
This became BP
's most widely-reviewed text, and received a mixed reception. Robert Liddell
was again outraged, calling this a dreadful book which had only been made possible by the betrayal of Pym's friends in...
Education
Amanda McKittrick Ros
AMKR
gives no solid information about whether she ever attended school, or if so which one. She was deeply influenced during her childhood by romantic novels, particularly R. M. Roche
's The Children of the...
Publishing
Flora Annie Steel
In her extraordinarily productive year of 1897, FAS
contributed to the Lady's Realm an untitled essay in a debate begun by Marie Corelli
over the value of passionate love, in what was at the time...
As president of this society ASS
tried to get Marie Corelli
to a meeting, but in vain: Corelli was invincibly prejudiced against journalists, feeling mistreated by them. Swan, on the contrary, admired the women journalists'...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
Paul Bailey opens his introduction by quoting extensively from a scene in Ethel M. Dell
's The Top of the World which features a Proud Beauty and a Faithful Retainer. He also links Angel with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
ET
's protagonist, a monster of egotism, mentions Rhoda Broughton
and Corelli
in connection with her own work, but only to suggest that hers is worth yet greater sums of money than theirs.
Taylor, Elizabeth, and Paul Bailey. Angel. Virago.
76
She...
Family and Intimate relationships
Viola Tree
The wedding attracted so many people that traffic round about St. Martin's Church had for some hours to be diverted.
Beerbohm, Max, editor. Herbert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories of Him and of His Art. Hutchinson.
It hurt her pride that she made the scholarship list only after someone else had declined. She travelled daily by milk cart and milk train to this old-fashioned, rigorous school where teachers routinely used ridicule...
