Marie Corelli was the invention of Mary “Minnie” Mackay, the daughter of Charles Mackay, a Scottish journalist, poet, and balladeer. She had a lonely childhood near Box Hill, but her father's indulgence was an important factor in creating her romantic temperament. She published her first novel,
A Romance of Two Worlds, in 1886 when she was thirty (although she told her publisher she was nineteen). It was an unexpected popular success, launching a long and embattled career in which Corelli both pricked and mediated the tensions between the buying public and the masculine literary world. Marie Corelli is historically significant in that her novels participated in the Victorian machinery of the “bestseller” and the author/star system, and indeed Corelli's fame at the turn of the…
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Citation: Federico, Annette. "Marie Corelli". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 December 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1018, accessed 24 November 2024.]
