Marie Corelli: The Writer and the Woman

by Thomas F. G. Coates; R. S. Warren Bell

Thus wrote George Bentley, the publisher, to Marie Corelli on November 15th, 1888. At that time only three of her books had appeared—“A Romance of Two Worlds,” “Vendetta,” and “Thelma”—and she was engaged upon the latter portion of “Ardath.” She was in the spring of her career, probing the Unknown and the Unseen, the Long Ago and the Future, with daring flights of fancy that had already set the world wondering.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bentley watched over his protégée with a care that was almost parental. A number of extracts from his wise and helpful letters will be given in the course of this work; and the reader will not fail to observe that there was very much more in Mr. Bentley’s attitude than a mere desire to coin pretty expressions for the benefit of a charming young woman possessed of undeniable genius. He could be very candid in his criticisms, when occasion demanded, but his tact was unfailing, and his sympathy boundless. He was one of an old school of which but few examples now remain. He was a personal friend as well as a publisher, one who could regard an author as something more than a creature with a money-producing imagination. He was of the school that produced Blackwood, Murray, Smith—the famous scions of those houses—and others whose names have ever been uttered with affection by those men and women of the pen who had dealings with them. One has only to peruse the correspondence which passed between John Blackwood, on the one side, and G. H. Lewes and George Eliot, on the other, to appreciate in full the power of encouragement and the influence a publisher possesses in his negotiations with a writer of promise.

Of a truth, Marie Corelli had need of such a friend, for her early career, as everybody knows, was thorny and troublous. A publisher greedy for a golden harvest might have prevailed upon her to write quickly, and, as a natural consequence, not at her best, for the certain gains which such work would produce in abundance. Mr. Bentley deprecated undue hurry. “You are now a person,” he says in one of his characteristic letters, “of sufficient importance not to have to depend on appearance or non-appearance. You have shown not only talent, but versatility, and that you are not a mere mannerist with one idea repeating itself in each book; consequently, when you next come, there will be expectation.”

In advising one possessed of so seemingly inexhaustible a fund of mental riches, Mr. Bentley was undertaking no light task. Moreover, he was offering counsel to a writer, who, to many people, was an absolute enigma.

For when Marie Corelli appeared as a novelist she was altogether new. She was something entirely fresh, and, to a certain extent, incomprehensible; as a result, she was reviled, she was told that she was impossible, she was treated as a pretending upstart: the critics would have none of her.

But her success with her first book, “A Romance of Two Worlds,” was due to itself, and not to either the praise or the censure of the press. Only four reviews of this romance appeared, each about ten lines long, and none of the four would have helped to sell a single copy. But the public got hold of it. People began to talk about it and discuss it. Then it was judged worth attacking, and the more continuous its sale the more it was jeered at by the critical fault-finders.

Marie Corelli did not invite adverse criticism. She was quite a girl, untried and inexperienced, and had, apparently, from her letters to her friends, a most touching faith in the chivalry of the press. “I hope,” she wrote to Mr. Bentley, “the clever men on the Press will be kind to me, as it is a first book [the ‘Romance’]; because if they are I shall be able to do so much better another time.”

But, much to her surprise, the clever men of the press bullied her as though she had been a practiced hand at literature, and abused her with quite unnecessary violence. She did not retort upon them, however. “Vendetta,” “Thelma,” “Ardath,” and other works were produced patiently in rotation, and still the abuse continued—and so did her success. It was only with the publication of “Barabbas” and the distinctly unfair comments that book received, that she at last threw down the gauntlet, and forbade her publishers to send out any more of her books for review.

This action practically put an end to the discussion of her works in the literary journals by critics with warped ideas of fair play. For they failed to remember that, though his draftsmanship may here and there display a flaw, an artist should be judged by the conception of his design—by his coloring—by the intention of his work as a whole.

Five years have elapsed since the one-sided truce was called; those critics, wandering by the bookshops, see people issuing therefrom bearing in their hands the hated volumes—the brain-children of the woman who had met them in unequal combat. They read in the papers of the gigantic sales of these works; they lift their hands in horror, and sigh for the gone days of authors who appealed but to the cultured few. So waggeth the world of letters; so arriveth that person to be trampled on—offend he or she the critics by ever so little—the New Writer.