Carol Margaret Davison and Elaine M. Hartnell
In the introduction to his edition of Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan for the Oxford Popular Fiction series a decade ago, Peter Keating rightly noted that: “There is virtually no worthwhile criticism of [Marie] Corelli’s work, and even the biographies tend to focus on her eccentricities which were notable.”2 Although Keating fails to mention it, the problem of sexist bias plagued the majority of those biographies. Take the following outrageous comment from Brian Masters in 1978 when attempting to explain the Corelli phenomenon:
Women without men usually have overweening ambition, coupled with a ruthless determination to satisfy it. Deprived of the primitive function which is their right, they spend their lives trying to show the world that they too can achieve something. The phenomenon of Marie Corelli is less a case for the literary critic than for the psychiatrist.3
As the various journalistic obituaries detailing her career especially attest, numerous pseudo-psychiatrists posing as literary critics have weighed in on the “Corelli conundrum”—the apparent puzzle surrounding her tremendous success. Foremost among her “analysts” was J.M. Stuart-Young, who, writing under the pseudonym “Peril” in a 1906 article in the Westminster Review entitled “A Note upon Marie Corelli by Another Writer of Less Repute”, attempted to account for what he called the “Corelli cult”.4 His explanation is contradictory at best, suggesting as it does that her works both reflected and cultivated national degeneration. Stuart-Young leaves no doubt, however, as to his predominant claim—namely, that Corelli is an insidious contributing force to the degenerative state of the nation. Central to her power, he maintains, is the fact that she is “the most emotional writer among us to-day”.5 Although he notes that the late Queen Victoria had a standing order for all of Marie Corelli’s publications6, he erroneously theorizes that Corelli’s readership was otherwise comprised of the “unthinking classes”7—“the members of her own sex, in middle-class society, and from the working-classes — shop-girls and young men of the larger towns”8—and he suggests that her popularity signals the nation’s mediocrity, stupidity, and lack of perception.9 In his sustained and vitriolic anti-Corelli campaign, Stuart-Young notably confesses that Corelli “helped to derange [his] adolescence”.10 In what he implies is his saner and more sober adulthood, he denounces her as a “false god”11 whose work is not even original. Corelli plagiarized such ideas as those of the Rosy Cross and the Electric Creed, he claims, from the work of an unnamed French Decadent writer.12 Like many before and after him, Stuart-Young predictably assumes the role of psychiatrist, labelling Corelli “an erotic degenerate of the subtlest type”13 and a “man-woman” who combines the worst aspects of both sexes.14 As her novels help to nurture a nation of criminals and weaklings15, the only solution to such a menace—this “national evil […] [and] peril to the social state”16—is to ban them. Whatever solution is selected, Stuart-Young prophesies that Corelli will be forgotten, like Ann Radcliffe, 50 years hence.17
As regards literary criticism, Corelli did not fare much better in the remainder of the twentieth century. John Lucas’s assessment of Corelli, dating from 1979, for example, essentially echoes Stuart-Young’s. According to Lucas:
[…] she isn't a great novelist, she isn't even a good one. But her books are of interest because they clearly reflect opinions, wishes, likes and dislikes that were widely current during the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. If you want to know what the man on the Clapham omnibus thought of life during those years, Marie Corelli’s books will help to tell you.18
If Corelli may be said to have a single redeeming feature, according to Lucas, it is that her work functions as a gauge of the contemporary common man’s world view. Thus is the concept of Corelli’s works as simple (read effortless, unskilful), unmediated productions again promoted.
If a “Corelli conundrum” may actually be said to exist, it involves the pronounced ambivalence that has characterized Corelli criticism since the time of her earliest publications. She seems to elicit extreme responses, the Stuart-Youngs of the world lining up only on one side of the divide. While some critical commentators deem Corelli’s works flawed in their biblical knowledge and even sacrilegious, for example, others—in some instances prominent clergymen—praise her as a “Puritan of the Pen” who fulfils a “quasi-religious function”.19 Father Ignatius, a prominent monk at Llanthony Abbey, repeatedly praised Corelli’s most popular best-seller, The Sorrows of Satan, and went on record with the following statement:
Marie Corelli is doing more for the faith than Archbishops and Bishops and convocations put together; there are thousands upon thousands throughout English speaking Christendom who will bless the pages that Marie Corelli has penned. Where did the courage come from that made this woman so bold that the Personality of God, the Divinity of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, and the necessity of a religious education should spring from her pen?20
Ambivalent responses to Corelli’s work are in keeping with the various ideological ambivalences that several recent critics have maintained inhere in her works. In The Gender of Modernity, for example, Rita Felski takes up the long-standing issue of Corelli’s vexed relationship to feminism. She identifies an oscillation in Corelli’s works “between recurring expressions of anger, frustration, and resentment toward the male sex” alongside a yearning “for oceanic dissolution of the self in an ecstatic merging of souls”.21 Similarly, Annette Federico, author of the only monograph that, fairly successfully, assesses Corelli’s writing against the backdrop of the fin-de-siècle and Edwardian eras22, notes Corelli’s complex relationship to the Decadence movement. Federico claims that Corelli’s 1890 anti-Decadent, anti-absinthe novel, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris, is “completely dependent on decadent tropes”.23 In her words, this “antidecadent novel is packaged as the very flower of decadence, even down to the colour green, which Wilde popularized as ‘the sign of a subtle artistic temperament’”.24
If for no other reason, the ideological and aesthetic complexities repeatedly identified in Corelli’s works justify their reappraisal. While each essay in this special issue undertakes this long-overdue enterprise to varying degrees, they do so for other significant reasons, among them the reconsideration of Corelli’s noteworthy generic innovations and eclecticism, and her compelling treatment of a broad spectrum of contentious issues varying from gender roles and marriage to science and spirituality. The fin de siècle witnessed a proliferation of new novel types—among them the boy’s adventure novel, the spiritual romance, and science fiction—and the experimental Corelli was certainly of her age with her unique blend of sensationalism, mysticism, romance, and the Gothic (to name but a few styles she employed). Much can be better understood in retrospect in relation to the gender and literary politics that dogged this ardent defender of the romance mode. Gender-aware developments in cultural studies since the 1970s relating to such things as the theorization of popular fiction and the best-seller have helped to explain Corelli’s canonical status. In the light of these phenomena, Corelli may be described as a serious and unfortunate casualty in a battle over aesthetic values at a particularly significant moment in literary critical history—namely, the emergence of literary Modernism, which involved the establishment of an ever-widening chasm between “high” and “popular”/“low” literature. Corelli’s enemies, however, extended beyond supporters of the burgeoning Modernist movement to include promoters of the New Woman movement and realists/naturalists of all stripes. While present-day feminists have been unwilling to reclaim her due to her often strident anti-New Woman stance, Corelli was actually a self-reflexive writer whose views on women’s issues changed over the course of her lifetime.
In contradistinction, the authors of the seven essays appearing in this special issue do not disown Corelli. Whether discussing deathbed scenes, science, Modernism, genre, or authorial persona, they present a fresh approach to her writing that will hopefully encourage a new generation of scholars to (re)appraise Corelli for themselves.
Nickianne Moody’s opening essay, “Moral Uncertainty and the Afterlife: Explaining the Popularity of Marie Corelli’s Early Novels”, offers up a theoretically grounded vindication of Corelli that analyses some of the reasons behind her popular appeal. Provocatively comparing Corelli to a spiritualist because her work is uplifting, religious, didactic, and popular, Moody considers Corelli’s strategies as an author of best-sellers, “polysemic texts that can be read from many and contrasting subject positions”. By way of an analysis of the death sequences in five of Corelli’s early novels—which varied in their treatment from the realistic to the fantastic—Moody examines Corelli’s ability to raise moral questions relating to taboo subjects without f...
