Marie Corelli

Mary Mc Kay, better known under her pen name Marie Corelli, was one of the most renown novel writers of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century Great-Britain. Some of her novels sold at more than a hundred thousand each and were, in her time, more popular than Arthur Conan Doyle's or Rudyard Kipling 1. James Agate wrote that she combined « […] the imagination of a Poe with the style of an Ouida and the mentality of a nursemaid 2 ». Corelli was most renowned for the way she intertwined esoteric concepts with social satire. Though the present state of research makes it difficult to state precisely what Corelli read or heard of German idealism, she explicitly mentions theosophy as a fraud in several of her novels, though her corpus often uses concepts borrowed from Christian science, spiritualism or gnosis. The Soul of Lilith was published in 1891 and is typically representative of Corelli's experiments on what was yet to be called science-fiction. This three-volume novel begins with a note stating that the events related are true, and that the narrative should rather be read as a report on an experiment than as a work of fiction. The following story does not assume to be what is generally understood by a "novel." It is simply the account of a strange and daring experiment once actually attempted, and is offered to those who are interested in the unseen "possibilities" of the Hereafter, merely for what it is,—a single episode in the life of a man who voluntarily sacrificed his whole worldly career in a supreme effort to prove the apparently Unprovable 3. This warning only emphasizes the tension sustained all through the narrative between realism and fancy. The plot is centered on three characters, El-Râmi Zaranos, mentioned in the warning, an eastern magnetizer who inherited the knowledge of the ancient Chaledans, his young brother Féraz, whom El-Râmi turned into a poet by using his magnetic influence, and a sleeping maiden named Lilith, kept in a secret room of their house in London. El-Râmi found Lilith dying in the desert ten years earlier. At the very moment when she was about to pass away, he hypnotized her and injected in her veins a mysterious fluid charged with astral energy. Through this means, he kept her body alive, though asleep, while he kept using his hypnotic power over her spirit in order to make her explore the whole universe in search of God and of Hell.

A notorious characteristic of English society is the universal marketing of our unmarried women ; a marketing peculiar to ourselves in Europe, and only rivalled by the slave merchants of the East. We are a match-making nation. 1 Th e 'universal marketing' of 'unmarried women' referred to by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1836 in his critical refl ection on English culture and society recognizes the economic implications of what would become known as the Victorian marriage market. Th e idea of women being for sale via transactional marriage arrangements is not new in feminist critical studies and has been frequently considered in the context of the marriage plot. 2 Th e valuing of a marriageable woman according to her beauty dates back for centuries, and was also tied to her social class, economic fortune, virginity and virtue , and accomplishments . Such qualities made her an object of desire in a marriage system that imitated the conditions of market sales. Th is book began as an attempt to understand the Victorian marriage market , a cultural cliché so widespread in Victorian fi ction that it appears to be taken for granted in literary and cultural history. My understanding of the Victorian marriage market is two-pronged. At the outset, it is a metaphor for the way in which families sought to arrange fi nancially and socially advantageous marital unions between their sons and daughters in order to preserve 'the two interrelated factors of social and economic interest, which traditionally determined marriage choice' . 3 Relatedly, the marriage market also refers to publicly organized events intended to bring eligible men and women together, or as Patricia Jalland notes: 'elaborate social conventions were created to restrict and regulate young love among the upper-middle and upper class. Th e London season , 'coming out' country house parties and balls -all operated to ensure that young people only met others of desirable social background' . 4 Th e London season in particular served as a more literal kind of marriage market because a young woman's presence at various social engagements during this season announced her candidature for marriage, with the result that many 784 Aestheticism.indd 1 784 Aestheticism.indd

witticism became proverbial, a summing up of all the frustrations of distance and dilatory micromanagement. In the Sudan on 2 September 1898, followers of the Khalifa Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi made a frontal attack on British troops near Omdurman, just across the Nile from Khartoum. Forty-eight British and Egyptian soldiers died in the ensuing battle, and around eleven thousand jihadis. A recently laid railroad across the desert supplied the imperial campaign with weaponry (including fifty rapid-firing Maxim guns, the latest-model rifles, and soft pointed bullets from the arsenal at Dum-Dum, near Calcutta), while telegraph lines supplied information. Among the most assiduous users of those lines was the London Daily Mail's star war correspondent, George Warrington Steevens, whose despatches were also passed on to the publisher William Blackwood & Sons for house-styling and immediate setting. With Kitchener to Khartum, Steevens's book about the campaign, was published in Edinburgh on 27 September, just 25 days after al-Mahdi's attack. Yet even this was later than intended because, after the battle military traffic had blocked access to the telegraph system: a note in the first edition explains that had the original plan of setting "the concluding chapters of this book from telegraphic reports" been followed, it would have come out the previous week.

In 1893, the well-known translator of Western works Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862-1920) introduced in Japan an adaptation of the gothic novel Vendetta! - The story of one forgotten (1886) by Marie Corelli (1855-1924) under the new title The white-haired demon (Hakuhatsuki). Few decades later, in 1932, the detective story writer Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) published a new adaptation based on Ruikō's translation, but made structural changes and gave it a strong Japanese connotation. Through a comparative approach, this paper aims to analyse the transformations of Vendetta! - The story of one forgotten in Ruikō's and Ranpo's adaptations and its value within their literary worlds.

In 1893, the well-known translator of Western works Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862-1920) introduced in Japan an adaptation of the gothic novel Vendetta! - The story of one forgotten (1886) by Marie Corelli (1855-1924) under the new title The white-haired demon (Hakuhatsuki). Few decades later, in 1932, the detective story writer Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965) published a new adaptation based on Ruikō's translation, but made structural changes and gave it  a strong Japanese connotation. Through a comparative approach, this paper aims to analyse the transformations of Vendetta! - The story of one forgotten in Ruikō's and Ranpo's adaptations and its value within their literary worlds.

Malgré l'apparente opposition entre la misogynie des Goncourt et le féminisme de Marie Corelli ou l'indépendance de Rachilde, leurs romans montrent que la femme artiste sacrifiée en bouc émissaire au nom de son art, est à voir comme un modèle d'humanité accomplie par-delà les limites entre masculin et féminin.

In 1897, Marie Corelli’s bestselling fiction, 'The Sorrows of Satan' (1895), was adapted as a melodrama for the Shaftesbury Theatre, London by Paul M. Berton and Henry Woodgate. This adaption was one of a significant number, attesting to the tremendous commercial success of the novel. Yet, such plays are critically neglected in scholarship to date. My research is, in part, a recuperation of these texts, as I map the intersections of religious affect and melodramatic modes of story-telling through novels and adaptations alike. This paper emerges from that research, and focuses on the Berton and Woodgate manuscript, which is currently housed in the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection in the British Library Archives. The play is set in London predominantly, and uses that urban setting and culture to characterise Satan as something of a modern, city dandy. However, the final act of the Berton and Woodgate melodrama abandons the affluent and atheistic realm of the city, and instead concludes with a thunderstorm at sea, the revelation of Satan as he truly is, and a final tableau of Jacob’s vision to heaven (Genesis 28). In this paper, I analyse that closing tableau in both its biblical and late-Victorian contexts. More broadly, this paper addresses the play’s use of spectacle, dream visions, and space, in order to demonstrate the mobility of divine presence within the text. (City, Space and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century Performance, University of Warwick, Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava, Venice, 8-10 June 2018).

This chapter identifies a trend that saw Egyptian hotels constructed as places of Gothic fantasy in literature of the late nineteenth century. Drawing upon the works of Victorian writers such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, Guy Boothby, and Sabine Baring-Gould, the essay proposes that the luxury hotel with its theatrical decor offered an immersive dream-like experience, and thus provided a suitable setting for plots involving ghostly visions, hypnotic influence, and hallucination. Egypt, in particular, was home to a host of such venues. As a fashionable Winter destination for British and American travellers alike, and with its hotels boasting all of the same modern comforts as their counterparts on the continent, Egyptian hotels were particularly susceptible to becoming sites where characters with a taste for opulence and who move in the most glittering social circles come face to face with the occult.   
Corelli’s Ziska (1897), Boothby’s ‘A Professor of Egyptology’ (1878), Grant Allen’s My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies’, and Baring-Gould’s ‘Mustapha’ (1894) are analysed within the historical and cultural context of Egypt’s real hotels. In such places, where the décor was often based on ancient Egyptian temples or tombs, stepping over the threshold was akin to stepping back in time. Frequently, hotel entertainment included the unwrapping of mummies which had been installed in genuine tombs earlier that day for the guests to ‘discover’. The blurring of the invented and the real actually encountered in these spaces is, I argue, key to an understanding of the fiction that they inspired. As places where the rich and famous congregated, Cairo’s luxury hotels became places of aspirational reverie, where one could rub shoulders with royalty, presidents, prime ministers, celebrities and eccentric Egyptologists. Shepheard’s Hotel and the Mena House, in particular, were some of the most famous hotels in the world in their time. As such, they were of crucial cultural significance when considering not only Victorian narratives of extravagant fantasy, but also the hotel in the broader context of nineteenth-century fiction.

Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development, and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar faces such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson, to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel. New research illuminates the relationship between the Decadents and such popular writers as George Moore, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Marie Corelli, and Sarah Grand. This research also challenges myths about the Decadents. It describes how this so-called 'tragic generation' pursued their artistic aspirations in the literary marketplace, created an art form that was more popular than avant-garde, sought both literary and commercial success, and negotiated the transition from the Victorian triple-decker to experimental Modernist fiction. MacLeod fills a large gap in our knowledge of a pivotal but misunderstood literary and cultural movement.