‘Fairy tales’ and ‘bunkum’: Marie Corelli, Artefacts and Fabrications

This chapter centres on the spectral stories and rumours which orbited ancient Egyptian artefacts in the possession of literary authors, along with the Egyptological connections such authors made. It focuses on Marie Corelli, her one-time friend Oscar Wilde, reading Wilde’s scarab ring that recalled the rare and expensive objects in his own writings as finding a literary counterpart in Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895). Corelli’s devil is Wilde’s double, Wilde’s scarab ring represented as a live beetle within which resides the soul of a mummified princess. Such a depiction, this chapter claims, reflects Corelli’s condemnation of Wilde, and decadence more broadly. Also considered is a necklace that Corelli was given by Sir John Aird, partially comprised of ancient Egyptian beads. This object’s renderings in a heretofore neglected archival source along with Corelli’s lifelong companion’s memoirs, illuminate her belief that ancient Egyptian jewellery allowed spiritual connections between the ancient and modern worlds. Ultimately, this chapter unearths how Corelli, proposing that she was a reincarnated Egyptian princess, fashioned herself as an alternative Egyptological authority at odds with masculine, scholarly Egyptology represented by figures such as E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum.

Writing the Sphinx

This book unearths a rich tradition of creative flexibility, collaboration and mutual influence between literary culture and Egyptology from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the aftermath of the high-profile discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. The first book-length study to focus in depth on the symbiotic relationship between literature and Egyptological culture, it analyses the works of Egyptologists including Howard Carter and E. A. Wallis Budge alongside those of their literary contemporaries such as H. Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli. Combining literary criticism with book history and reception studies, it incorporates a number of archival primary sources which have, until now, escaped critical attention, and reads canonical literature alongside works by lesser-known authors, to ascertain the proliferation of twin Egyptological and literary interests. It was across this period, this book shows, that as a result of the public fervour stirred up by its gilded discoveries and the ancient language that its scholars had so recently deciphered, its high-profile practitioners (both expert and amateur) and its wide range of associations in the cultural consciousness (from magic and longevity, to sexual desire and horror), that Egyptology and its cultural offshoots infiltrated the libraries, lives and minds of an extraordinarily eclectic audience.

Olive Schreiner, Marie Corelli and the Anxieties of Female Authorship

This article explores the competing models of gendered authorship emerging from Marie Corelli’s multiple print encounters with Olive Schreiner. Where Schreiner is cast by Corelli as the modish darling of a snobbish literary intelligentsia, who is beloved by critics and ignored by readers, Corelli herself emerges from her writings about Schreiner as the democratic author par excellence, a writer for the people rather than the press. In spite of the clear common ground that bridged their experience as celebrity authors, Corelli, in her writings about Schreiner, sought only to elucidate the ideological and artistic gulf that she identified as existing between them. As this essay will show, Corelli’s public resistance to Schreiner was a strike not only against an unfair male literary system of which she perceived Schreiner to be an arbitrary beneficiary, but also a rejection of the rhetoric of literary value that emerged in Britain during the fin de siècle. What Corelli failed to understand was that to be a woman writer at this time, however successful, was to occupy an ambiguous position within dominant, masculinist discourses of artistic distinction. A fuller exploration of Schreiner and Corelli’s positions within and experiences of the late-Victorian literary marketplace not only reveals the frailty of Correlli’s oppositional construction in real terms, but also signals the extent to which it was their shared status as women writers that was the key determinant shaping their respective experiences of professional authorship.

The Angel in the Publishing House: Authorial Self-Fashioning, Gender, and Orphanhood in Marie Corelli's Innocent

The best-selling Victorian novelist Marie Corelli (1855–1924) is a literary figure enmeshed in contradictions. Famously refusing to identify as a New Woman writer, she was known for her womanly heroines and her own ultra-feminine style of dress. She shunned press photographers and ferociously protected her privacy. But Corelli was equally ferocious in her ambition for literary success and fame, and she does not altogether fit in with those women writers of the nineteenth century who staged an outer show of dominant domestic vocation and cast their fame as an unsought consequence of their natural genius. Through examination of Corelli's self-fashioned orphanhood, this article seeks to highlight her as an example of a fin-de-siècle woman writer who resisted consignment to the transgressive New Woman image and more traditional gender roles. Taking Corelli's critically neglected 1914 novel Innocent: Her Fancy and His Fact as its focal point, and analysing the success of her self-fashioning by drawing upon the remembrances of members of Corelli's local community in Stratford-upon-Avon, recorded as part of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Oral History Project, this article explores the ways in which Corelli strengthened her orphan identity in her later fiction and, in so doing, strove to legitimise female authorship and celebrity.