The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers - Hardcover

Ransom, Teresa

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14 ratings by Goodreads

9780750915700: The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0750915706 ISBN 13: 9780750915700

Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd, 1999

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Marie Corelli dined with the Prince of Wales, entertained Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry, and split Stratford-upon-Avon into warring factions. In the 1890s, her novels were eagerly devoured by millions in England, America and the colonies. Her readers ranged from Queen Victoria and Gladstone to the poorest of shopgirls. In all she wrote 30 books, the majority of which were phenomenal bestsellers, and she dealt with all the popular themes of the day - spiritualism, science, romance, transcendentalism and religion. This biography describes Corelli's rise and considers her as a phenomenon of the Victorian age. Setting Corelli's story against the context of her time, the book examines how she blazed into fame from nothing to become the bestselling novelist of her age.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

The biography of a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose now forgotten mystical and romantic novels were bestsellers in England and around the world until WWII. According to Ransom (Fanny Trollope, not reviewed), the world-famous Marie Corelli may not have been Corelli at all, but Mary Mills or perhaps Minnie Mackay, the adopted or illegitimate daughter of journalist Charles Mackay, himself a well-known figure in 19th-century England. Then again, she may have been his granddaughter. Or left on his doorstep ``one snowy winter's night.'' Whatever her true lineage, she set out to be ``somebody'' and succeeded. Her 31 novels and assorted articles, booklets, and speeches were almost always blasted by critics and embraced by readers and audiences. The extraordinarily healthy sales of her books should also be judged against her contemporaries: H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde. Her fans included Queen Victoria, who requested that all of Corelli's books be sent to her, and her friend the Prince of Wales. Her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, was accepted for publication in 1885 when she was 30 years old. It concerned a heroine who was sent via ``Physical Electricity'' to visit other planets. Subsequent novels also dealt with mystical and spiritual experiences, but many deplored mankind's weaknesses (absinthe addiction in Wormwood) or celebrated womankind's strengths, although she was an ambivalent feminist (against the vote but for independence). She was prescient about atomic power, germ warfare, sex education in schools, and historic preservation. Settled in Stratford-on-Avon with her lifelong friend Bertha van der Vyver, she antagonized the town fathers with her fight to preserve Shakespeare-era cottages and continued to scuffle with them through WWI. Corelli died in 1924, but her books had a brief New Age revival in the 1960s. The author has struggled to piece together fragmented historical material, for which Victorian scholars will be grateful. (12 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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