Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Chronology
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Stratford-Upon-Avon's “Great Little Lady”
- Chapter 2 From “Girl Alone” to “Genius”: Corelli's Transforming Epistolary Rhetoric
- Chapter 3 Marie Corelli, the Public Sphere and Public Opinion
- Chapter 4 “The Muses Are Women; So Are the Fates”: Corelli's Literary Masquerade(s)
- Chapter 5 The Devil & Miss Corelli: Re-gendering the Diabolical and the Redemptive in The Sorrows of Satan
- Chapter 6 Muscular Christianity Unbound: Masculinity in Ardath
- Chapter 7 Over Her (Un)dead Body: Gender Politics, Mediumship and Feminist Spiritual Theology in the Works of Marie Corelli
- Chapter 8 “The Story of a Dead Self ”: The Theosophical Novels of Marie Corelli
- Chapter 9 “Something Vile in the Composition”: Marie Corelli's Ziska, Decadent Portraiture and the New Woman
- List of Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - “The Story of a Dead Self ”: The Theosophical Novels of Marie Corelli
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Chronology
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Stratford-Upon-Avon's “Great Little Lady”
- Chapter 2 From “Girl Alone” to “Genius”: Corelli's Transforming Epistolary Rhetoric
- Chapter 3 Marie Corelli, the Public Sphere and Public Opinion
- Chapter 4 “The Muses Are Women; So Are the Fates”: Corelli's Literary Masquerade(s)
- Chapter 5 The Devil & Miss Corelli: Re-gendering the Diabolical and the Redemptive in The Sorrows of Satan
- Chapter 6 Muscular Christianity Unbound: Masculinity in Ardath
- Chapter 7 Over Her (Un)dead Body: Gender Politics, Mediumship and Feminist Spiritual Theology in the Works of Marie Corelli
- Chapter 8 “The Story of a Dead Self ”: The Theosophical Novels of Marie Corelli
- Chapter 9 “Something Vile in the Composition”: Marie Corelli's Ziska, Decadent Portraiture and the New Woman
- List of Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By the turn of the century Marie Corelli was the most popular woman novelist in the entire world at a time when most people were reacting against anything Victorian. Her first novel was published in 1886 (A Romance of Two Worlds) when high Victorian morality was being displaced by the high decadence of the “Yellow Nineties.” Corelli reacted against rising hedonism and secularism with its displacement of faith in science instead of in religion. Her books touted Victorian values, sentimentality and spirituality. They were replete with “the pieties of both Puritan and Evangelical in America and England. She always rewarded virtue and punished vice” (Kowalczyk 850), just as did most of the earlier Victorian writers. Additionally, as Nickianne Moody tells it, Corelli “challenge[d] science by appropriating its discourse and positing spiritualism. The presence of the spiritual use[d] evidence of the past to reveal the social bankruptcy of the present” (“Lawyers” 185).
In that her novels were highly moralistic and didactic, the question follows: Why did they break every sales record? George Bullock, one of her early biographers, proffered his theory about her success:
Her didactic way of writing intimidated the majority of the reading public into accepting her as a big moral force, and the serious tone in which she expounded the curative powers of electricity helped to place her among the writers with a message. Those two qualities essential for a best-seller, sincerity and vitality, she possessed in abundance. Nothing could have exceeded the passion with which she attacked moral lapses, whilst championing purity and going to the rescue of the weak. She had the zeal of a missionary, the declamatory methods of an evangelist, and she captured the loyalty of her readers at one sitting. (44– 45)
Romance, rife with the supernatural, “was a runaway bestseller, and was devoured by all classes of reader” (Sutherland, “Marie” 204). Corelli told her publisher, Richard Bentley, that the reason it was so successful was because it “touched a chord somewhere in the great nerves of humanity.”
One chord had to do with how people coped, or failed to cope, with death. The Victorians had an “evangelical notion and desire for a ‘good death’ ” (Moody, “Moral” 189).
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- Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century , pp. 157 - 176Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2019