“I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.”
Novelist, Marie Corelli (1855-1924)
Novelist, Marie Corelli (1855-1924)
Glad to see Marie is getting some loving. Here are some interesting Marie facts.
She wrote romantic novels that were hugely popular but often derided by the intellectual elite as trashy & poorly written.
She wrote romantic novels that were hugely popular but often derided by the intellectual elite as trashy & poorly written.
Critic, 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."
She still frequently outsold contemporaries like Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling
She may have invented the name Thelma. If she didn’t come up with it herself, her 1887 novel Thelma plucked the name from obscurity & made it popular.
She lived in Stratford-upon-Avon and campaigned hard for buildings & gardens to be preserved - often pissing off ambitious industrialists.
She was fined for hoarding sugar in WW1. She tried to argue this was patriotic because she wanted to make jam for everyone. The court didn’t buy it & Marie said there would be a Revolution within a week (there wasn’t).
She never married but was clearly in love with the artist Arthur Severn (1842-1931). Marie met Arthur when she was 51 & he was happily married.
Her feelings for him often border on obsessive & she wrote to him almost daily. She also wrote to his wife, Joan, as a kind of alibi - “I can’t be off here because I’m just writing to couple”.
Ten years of letters from Marie to Arthur are housed at The University of Detroit Mercy library & show the desperate frustration of being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back
Because she couldn’t be open about her feelings, the letters are often very cryptic & find things to use as a proxy for her feelings. This is her writing about one of Arthur’s paintings (she called him Pen): victorianweb.org/authors/corell…
But there’s a further plot twist. Several biographers have argued Marie was bisexual. She didn’t ever identify as such but lived with her companion, Bertha Vyver for over 40 years.
The two women were very intensely attached to one another. She left everything to Bertha when she died and they buried next to one another.
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