Marie Corelli

Miss Marie Corelli and her pet dog

Mary Mackay was born in London to Elizabeth Mills, a servant of the Scottish poet and songwriter Dr Charles Mackay, her biological father.[5] In 1866, eleven-year-old Mary was sent to a Parisian convent to further her education. She returned to Britain four years later in 1870.

Mackay began her career as a musician, giving piano recitals and adopting the name Marie Corelli for her billing. Eventually she turned to writing and published her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, in 1886. In her time, she was the most widely read author of fiction. Her works were collected by Winston Churchill, Randolph Churchill, and members of the British Royal Family, among others.[6]

She faced criticism from the literary elite for her allegedly melodramatic writing. In The Spectator, Grant Allen called her "a woman of deplorable talent who imagined that she was a genius, and was accepted as a genius by a public to whose commonplace sentimentalities and prejudices she gave a glamorous setting."[7] James Agate represented her as combining "the imagination of a Poe with the style of an Ouida and the mentality of a nursemaid."[8][9]

A recurring theme in Corelli's books is her attempt to reconcile Christianity with reincarnation, astral projection, and other mystical ideas. She was associated at some point with the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis; a Rosicrucian and mystical organization,[10][11][12] and her books were a part of the foundation of today's corpus of esoteric philosophy. Her portrait was painted by Helen Donald-Smith.

Corelli famously had little time for the press. In 1902 she wrote to the editor of The Gentlewoman to complain that her name had been left out of a list of the guests in the Royal Enclosure at the Braemar Highland Gathering, saying she suspected this had been done intentionally. The editor replied that her name had indeed been left out intentionally, because of her own stated contempt for the press and for the snobbery of those wishing to appear in "news puffs" of society events. Both letters were published in full in the next issue.[13]

The writer also gained some fame after her letter on the curse of the Pharaohs to New York World was published. Corelli claimed that she had warned George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon (one of the finders of the tomb of Tutankhamun) about the "dire punishment" likely to occur to those who rifle Egyptian tombs, claiming to cite an ancient book that indicated that poisons had been left after burials.[14][15]

Corelli lived and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, 1901–1924. Her house, Mason Croft, is now the home of the Shakespeare Institute.

Corelli spent her final years in Stratford-upon-Avon. There she fought hard for the preservation of Stratford's 17th-century buildings, and donated money to help their owners remove the plaster or brickwork that often covered their original timber-framed façades.[16] Novelist Barbara Comyns Carr mentions Corelli's guest appearance at an exhibition of Anglo-Saxon items found at Bidford-on-Avon in 1923.[17] Corelli's eccentricity became well known. She would boat on the Avon in a gondola, complete with a gondolier, whom she had brought over from Venice.[18] In his autobiography, Mark Twain, who had a deep dislike of Corelli, describes visiting her in Stratford and how the meeting changed his perception.

Bertha Vyver

For over forty years, Corelli lived with her companion, Bertha Vyver,[19] to whom she left everything when she died. She did not identify herself as a lesbian, but several biographers and critics have noted the frequent erotic descriptions of female beauty that appear in her novels, although they are expressed by men.[20][21][22]

Corelli was known to have expressed a genuine passion for the artist Arthur Severn, to whom she wrote daily letters from 1906 to 1917. Severn was the son of Joseph Severn and close friend of John Ruskin. In 1910, she and Severn collaborated on The Devil's Motor, with Severn providing illustrations for Corelli's story. Her love for the long-married painter, her only known romantic attachment to a man, remained unrequited; in fact Severn often belittled Corelli's success.[23][24][25]

During the First World War, Corelli's personal reputation suffered when she was convicted of food hoarding.[26]

Marie Corelli died in Stratford and is buried there in the Evesham Road cemetery.

She died in Stratford and is buried there in the Evesham Road cemetery.[27] Later Bertha van der Vyver was buried alongside her.

• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. pp. 85.
• Carr, Barbara Comyns, Sisters by a River (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1947; new edition by Virago Press 1985)
• Coates, T. F. G. and R. S. Warren Bell. Marie Corelli: the Writer and the Woman. George W. Jacobs & Co.: Philadelphia, 1903. Reprinted 1969 by Health Research, Mokelume Hill, CA.
• Masters, Brian (1978). Now Barabbas was a rotter: the extraordinary life of Marie Corelli. London: H. Hamilton. p. 326.
• Felski, Rita (1995). The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard U P. pp. 247.
• Frederico, Annette (2000). Idol of suburbia: Marie Corelli and late-Victorian literary culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. p. 201.
• Lyons, Martyn. 2011. Books: a living history. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum.
• Ransom, Teresa, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (2013)
• Scott, William Stuart, Marie Corelli: the story of a friendship (London: Hutchinson, 1955)

• Works by Marie Corelli at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Marie Corelli at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Marie Corelli at Internet Archive
• Works by Marie Corelli at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)