Marie Corelli’s 1886 novel Thelma, a Norwegian Princess resulted in a flood of baby girls named Thelma, a name she apparently created. One of those babies was my own mother, born in 1921. Apparently my grandmother had told my mother she was named after a book or a character in a book that she had read and loved.
Curiosity piqued, I began to research books with that title, and learned about an amazing writer.
Victorian author Marie Corelli was once called “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.”
British critic James Agate said the writer had “the imagination of a Poe with the style of a Ouida and the mentality of a nursemaid.”
However, literary slurs against Marie Corelli (1855? – 1924) did little to dampen the sales of her twenty-plus novels. She was the most widely read novelist in England in her time, a veritable superstar. She was Queen Victoria’s favorite author! Other devoted fans included The Prince of Wales, King Edward VII, Queen Alexandra, Oscar Wilde, and Winston Churchill. The writer outsold her contemporaries, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, by the thousands.
Sorrows of Satan (1895) is regarded as the world’s first bestseller, breaking all previous publishing records.
From fantasy to foretelling the future
Corelli wrote of fantasy worlds, spirituality and science, the secret underground chambers of pyramids, immortality, Baby Jesus as a time-traveling street urchin, Satan as an misunderstood adventurer, weird theories of electricity to radium and radioactivity, and she foretold wireless telegraphy and X-rays.
Essayist Jessica Amanda Salmonson, in Maria Corelli and her Occult Tales, says of the author:
Corelli’s occult novels adhered to no popular system. She had her own wacky ideas and stuck to them, which was probably to the good, since we thereby gain access to her own fancies and do not have to suffer the promulgation of soon-to-be-outmoded movements and fantastical religious fads. Corelli’s novels were genuinely eccentric even within that eccentric atmosphere. Theosophic romancers were a dime a dozen in those days, but not a half-dozen possessed Corelli’s peculiar fascination. She is the only author of her type, after Bulwer Lytton, who retains anything resembling a broad modern audience.
Today, a pitch for Corelli’s debut novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, might read:
Our down and out heroine thinks of taking her own life until she is electrified, literally, by a Chaldean master, after which a guardian angel spirits her on a cosmic journey by astral projection. Being able to witness the source of creation through a handsome angel, however, is not enough for her. She wants to master this ability on her own, at great peril to her soul.
Who was she, really?
Little is known about her early life, much due to her own secretiveness, but it’s presumed she was the illegitimate daughter of a Scottish poet/songwriter, who “adopted” her, and his mistress. A short chronology of her life can be read on a website dedicated to her here.
She lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, and was known for being eccentric. She died in Stratford and is buried there in the Evesham Road cemetery. She left everything to her companion of forty years, Bertha Vyver.
What is known is that she waged a war with savage highbrow literary critics and struggled mightily to manage her own image as a celebrity in an often-contradictory manner. For that, I admire her.
Marie Corelli’s works are available for free download online: Project Gutenberg.
My Thelma
Prior to the internet, my mother really didn’t know how to research book titles to learn about her name, nor a way to understand how truly original it is.
I found an early copy of the novel on Abe Books and gave it to her when she was in her nineties. She was astounded to know there actually was a book titled Thelma!
