Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli

Teresa Ransom

Description

'Who was Marie Corelli?' shrieked the news headlines after she died in 1924, but no-one really knew. Her past was obscured by such a fog of lies and concealment that it was impossible to unravel.In the 1890s her novels were eagerly devoured by millions around the world, her readers ranging from Queen Victoria and Gladstone to the lowest of shop girls. It was known that the famous authoress had dined with the Prince of Wales, entertained Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry, and even managed to split Stratford-upon-Avon into warring factions.In all she wrote thirty-one books, the majority of which were phenomenal bestsellers, in which she dealt intriguingly with the popular themes of the day, spiritualism, science, romance, transcendentalism and religion. At the height of her success Corelli was reputedly one of the most highly paid, and undoubtedly the best selling author in England. Yet the critics generally ignored her or belittled her work.Setting Corelli's story against the context of her time, it tells how she blazed into fame from nothing to become the bestselling novelist of her generation. Born around 1855, Marie, desperate to escape the shame of illegitimacy, had fabricated several different pasts, changed her name from Minnie Mackay to Marie Corelli and knocked fourteen years off her age. In 1886 she published her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds and rapidly achieved success.In 1899, after a serious illness she moved to Stratford-upon-Avon with her devoted companion, Bertha Vyver. Here she became one of the first conservationists. She bestowed money on many worthy causes, but was constantly at war with the local council for her insistence on the preservation of the town's old houses. When she died in 1924 crowds gathered outside her home. The press - capitalising on her outstanding popularity - invented fantastic stories about her origins. The mystery of Marie Corelli, however, has never been solved. After her death she faded from public memory, but today she is once again being recognised for her extraordinary place in Victorian society and her remarkable ability to captivate the reading public of her era.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Bulbeck Books
• Date de parution: 27 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783010738
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli
Queen of Victorian Bestsellers
By Teresa Ransom
*
© 1999, 2013 Teresa Ransom
Teresa Ransom has asserted her rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by Bulbeck Books
First published and printed in 1999 First published in eBook format in 2013
eISBN: 978-1-78301-073-8
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
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For my father, Tom Ridsdill Smith
*
Fame is a vapour; popularity is an accident. The only earthly certainty is oblivion. Mark Twain
Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can still fill several theatres at once, he cannot possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain. Arnold Bennett , Evening Standard, 19 July 1928
Remember that if you do persuade yourselves into thinking I am a Somebody, and if I turn out after all to be a Nobody, it is not my fault. Don’t blame me; blame your own self-deception. Inasmuch as it is necessary in my case to bear in mind that the Name is not the Person. Marie Corelli , The Silver Domino, 1892
CONTENTS
Plates
Introduction: The Enigma of Marie Corelli
Chapter 1 - Minnie Mackay
Chapter 2 - The Little Lady
Chapter 3 - The New George Sand?
Chapter 4 - Royal Patronage
Chapter 5 - Queen of the Bestsellers
Chapter 6 - ‘A Fairy Stirring up the World’
Chapter 7 - The Battle for Henley Street
Chapter 8 - Bitter Consequences
Chapter 9 - The Cold Courts of Fame
Chapter 10 - Infatuation
Chapter 11 - Lonely Woman
Chapter 12 - Bertha’s Legacy
Afterword
Appendix: The Mystery of Marie Corelli’s Birth
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
PLATES
Marie Corelli, 1906
Mary Mills/Minnie Mackay 1888
Marie Corelli sketched, 1903
Bertha Vyver, c. 1906
Annie Davis
Marie Corelli – before and after
Mason Croft, 1905
The music room
The winter garden
Marie in her gondola
Miss Corelli and Mrs Docker, 1910
Marie and Bertha, 1916
Marie Corelli’s funeral, 1924
The angel statue on Marie Corelli’s grave
The shield bearing the initials MC and BV
INTRODUCTION
The Enigma of Marie Corelli
Marie Corelli, famous author, and household name in 1900, was not the person her adoring public believed her to be. She lived under a false name and gave a false date of birth; she invented her past and declared her parents to be variously Italian, American or Scottish, and she had a single burning ambition. Early in her life she had written ‘I have made up my mind to be "somebody" and I’ll be as unlike anybody else as I can.’ In this she was entirely successful.
Her first book, published in 1886, A Romance of Two Worlds, was written when she was thirty-one years old and it set a pattern for all subsequent publications when it was condemned by the critics but devoured by an appreciative public. Her heroines stayed eternally young (as did Marie who told her publisher she was seventeen) and were beautiful, pure and good. During the next thirty-eight years she wrote a further thirty books and, with the publication of The Sorrows of Satan in 1895, became the top-selling author in Britain. She was the acknowledged ‘Queen of the Victorian Bestsellers’, but her readers never suspected that her greatest work of fiction was her own life. What they didn’t know was that hiding behind the posing and the arrogance was a woman with a shameful and unmentionable past. Marie Corelli was in reality Mary Mills or Minnie Mackay, illegitimate, exceptionally short, opinionated and with memories of an impoverished and miserable childhood. Marie Corelli, the beautiful and popular novelist, was entirely self-created and she fought savagely to protect her image, reacting fiercely when it was threatened.
Marie’s fans were legion and ranged from Queen Victoria, who insisted that she be sent a copy of every new book, down to the poorest of shop girls. She created a unique field of pseudo-Christian fantasy for an age which was obsessed by table rapping and spiritualism, and became the leading exponent of the uplifting novel, which denounced corruption and pointed the way to an idealised world.
She wrote with such fierce passion about real and imagined wrongs, about heaven and hell, about joy and despair, that she swept her readers along in a torrent of emotion. Unlike earlier ‘literary’ writers who wrote for a more intellectual public, Marie wrote, as she said, ‘directly from her heart to the hearts of the people’.
She wrote herself out of the misery of her childhood into the glorious freedom of make-believe, and carried along with her not only the romantics of all ages and every class, but the masses of ordinary people who only became literate when compulsory education was introduced in 1876. She transported her readers to Utopian planets where the good were rewarded and the evil punished, all so unlike the grim reality of Victorian England.
In the rapidly changing times of the late nineteenth century, Marie Corelli’s books reflected the concerns of her readers. She preached against corruption in the Church and deplored the worldliness and lack of faith of the priests. In ‘Society and Sunday’, she declared that Sunday was being ignored. Cards and gambling or motoring were much to blame, and it was largely the fault of the clergy, who were out of touch with modern thought and science. ‘They fail to seize the problems of the time. They forget, or wilfully ignore the discoveries of the age, yet in these could be found endless subject matter for the divinist arguments. Religion and Science viewed broadly do not clash so much as they combine. To the devout and deeply studious mind, the marvels of science are the truths of religion made manifest. Society sees for itself that too many clerics are either blatant or timorous. Some of them bully; others crawl. None of them seems to be able to cope with the great dark wave of infidelity and atheism which has swept over the modern world, stealthily, but overwhelmingly, sucking many a struggling soul down into the depths of suicidal despair.’ 1
Marie was also a strong feminist, believing that women should have more power and recognition and should be considered the equals of men, yet at the same time she felt that woman’s place was in the home and strongly disapproved of the suffragettes, calling them ‘Ladies who scream’. In ‘The Advance of Women’ she admonishes, ‘There is one thing that women generally, in the struggle for intellectual free life, should always remember – one thing they are too often and too apt to forget – namely, that the laws, as they at present exist, are made by men, for men. There are no really stringent laws on the protection of women’s interests except the Married Women’s Property Act, which is a great and needful boon.’ Women should be in medicine, law and education, said Marie: ‘One welcomes heartily the idea of women lawyers, in the hope that when their keen, quick brains learn to grasp the huge, unwieldy and complex machinery in the middle called Justice, they may, perhaps, be able to effect some reforms on behalf of their own sex.’ 2
She derided the power of the press; the indiscriminate way in which reporters used stories for their own ends, and the intrusive harassment of press photographers. She had a tilt at journalism. ‘Is not Journalism free? Not so... it is not the "voice of the people" at all; it is simply the voice of a few editors. Were the most gifted man that ever held pen to write a letter to any of the papers on a crying subject of national shame, he would be refused a hearing unless he were a friend of the proprietors of whatever journal he elected to write to. And men of genius seldom are friends of editors – a curious fact, but true.’ 3
She was bitter about the exclusiveness of London society, repressively controlled by a few peeresses who restricted entrance into the hallowed circle to a chosen few. ‘The balance of things is becoming alarmingly unequal; the "aristocratic" set are a scandal to the world with their divorce cases, their bankruptcies, their laxity of principle, their listless indifference to consequences; they never read, they never learn, they never appear to see anything beyond themselves. Whereas the "bas-peuple" are reading, and reading the books that have helped to make national destinies – they are learning, and they are not afraid to express opinions. They do not think a Duke who seduces his friend’s wife merely "unfortunate" – they call him in plain language a low blackguard.’ 4
She deplored the vulgarity of wealth, epitomised by Andrew Carnegie: ‘Millionaires are for the most part ill-mannered and illiterate, and singularly uninteresting in their conversation.’ A staunch conservationist, she disliked the American bounder who ‘comes to Great Britain with the fixed impression that everything in the "doomed old place" can be bought for money. Unfortunately he is often right.... Famous estates are knocked down to him – manuscripts and pictures, which should be the preciously guarded property of the nation, are easily purchased by him, – and laughing in his sleeve at the purblind apathy of the British Government, which calmly looks on while he pockets such relics of national greatness as unborn generations will vainly an