Marie Corelli (1854-1924) was a bestselling novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known for her larger-than-life personality as much as her gripping popular fiction, she was an early example of author-as-brand.
Exploding myths perpetuated by commercial biography, this is the first book on Corelli to draw upon twenty-first century research methods, solving the longstanding mystery of her birth, and explaining her phenomenal emergence into Victorian popular culture.
Corelli is shown to conceal working-class origins, a career on the stage, and a decade writing under a succession of pseudonyms for the periodical press. This book exclusively provides newly discovered information on her adoptive family and its network, as well as a never-before-revealed Corelli pseudonym.
This book contextualises the publication of Corelli's works, discusses her public speaking career, and evaluates her opinion on suffrage. Packed with rich detail, it engages throughout with scholarly debates on gender and sexuality.
Corelli is a fascinating and complicated figure, who will intrigue readers interested in the manifestation of modern celebrity. This book explores Corelli's authorial self-fashioning and her canny negotiation of the literary marketplace.
Where Corelli was previously deemed controversial, and she and her fiction classed as symbiotic quirks of the fin de siècle, this book uncovers a far more complex and interesting figure, whose writing reveals much about societal issues of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods.