Marie Corelli: The Writer and the Woman

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

Most of the critics entirely missed the point of “The Sorrows of Satan.” There is a notable character in the book—Lady Sibyl Elton. Now the idea of Lady Sibyl was an allegorical one. She represented, to Marie Corelli’s mind, the brilliant, indifferent, selfish, vicious impersonation of Society offering itself body and soul to the devil. This was completely lost sight of by most of those who criticised the book, and who had not the imagination to see beyond the mere forms of woman and fiend. All the other characters are arranged to play round this one central idea, so far as the “woman of the piece” was concerned.

It utterly surprised the author to find that people imagined that she had taken some real woman to portray, and had contrasted her badness with Mavis Clare to advertise her own excellent character against the other’s blackness. Facts, however, are facts. Marie Corelli considers that the evils of society are wrought by women; hence the impersonation of Lady Sibyl as a woman, courting the devil. Secondly, she considers that the reformation of society must be wrought by women; hence the impersonation of Mavis Clare, as a woman repelling the devil.

“The Sorrows of Satan” is now in its forty-third edition. The book has not only been read by representatives of all classes in all countries, but is valued and loved by many thousands who, by the wonderful power of this single pen, have been forced to think; and, by meditating upon the problems which make the book, have found themselves better men and women for the exercise.

“Thousands and tens of thousands throughout English-speaking Christendom,” declared Father Ignatius, “will bless the author who has dared to pen the pages of ‘The Sorrows of Satan’; they will bless Marie Corelli’s pen, respecting its denunciation of the blasphemous verses of a certain ‘popular British poet.’ Where did the courage come from that made her pen so bold that the personality of God, the divinity of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, the necessity of religious education should thus crash upon you from the pen of a woman?”

Courageous, indeed, is any author or speaker who attacks the selfishness, the materialism, the insincerity of much of our social life and of many of our social customs. And what made the attack so successful, what caused such bitter resentment on the part of those who hate Marie Corelli for her exposures of shams and impostures, and her valiant upholding of virtue and of truth, is the fact that the author has not only the courage which her convictions give her, but that she has the power that justifies her bravery! The book is a grand and successful attempt to show how women who are good and true hold the affection, the esteem, the devotion, the homage of men; it is an incentive to women to be in men’s regard the Good Angels that men best love to believe them; it is a lesson to women how to attain the noblest heights of womanhood.

As Marie Corelli, in discussing the “Modern Marriage Market,” has said, “Follies, temptations, and hypocrisies surround, in a greater or less degree, all women, whether in society or out of it; and we are none of us angels, though, to their credit be it said, some men still think us so. Some men still make ‘angels’ out of us, in spite of our cycling mania, our foolish ‘clubs,’—where we do nothing at all,—our rough games at football and cricket, our general throwing to the winds of all dainty feminine reserve, delicacy, and modesty,—and we alone are to blame if we shatter their ideals and sit down by choice in the mud when they would have placed us on thrones.”

The woman who reads and studies “The Sorrows of Satan” will desire to attain the angel ideal; and the lesson will be the better learned by the reading of this book because of the appalling picture of Lady Sibyl Elton, whose callousness and whose fin-de-siècle masquerading, lying, trickery, atheism, and vice, make up an abomination in the form of Venus that is a painting of many society beauties of the day,—soulless beauties whose bodies are as deliberately sold in the marriage mart as the clothes and jewels with which their damning forms are adorned.

And then in “The Sorrows of Satan” there is the unattractive personality of Geoffrey Tempest, a man with five millions of money, one of whose first declarations on the attainment of wealth is that he will give to none and lend to none, and who pursues a life of vanity, selfishness, and self-aggrandizement, until at last he repels the evil genius of the story, Prince Lucio Rimânez—the devil.

In the opening chapter of “The Sorrows of Satan” we are introduced to Mr. Geoffrey Tempest, at the moment a writer and a man of brains, but starving and sick at heart through a hopeless struggle against poverty, and railing against fate and the good luck of a “worthless lounger with his pockets full of gold by mere chance and heritage.” He is in the lowest depths of despair, having just had a book of somewhat lofty thoughts rejected with the advice that, to make a book “go,” it is desirable, from the publisher’s point of view, that it should be somewhat risqué; in fact, the more indecent the better. It was pitiful advice and wholly false, for the reason that the great majority of publishers most carefully avoid works of the kind. Tempest’s case is bad indeed. He must starve, because his ideas are “old-fashioned.” Moreover, he cannot pay his landlady her bill. And just at this critical moment two things happen. He receives £50 from an old chum and £5,000,000 from Satan. But he is not aware of the real source from which proceeds the latter sum. Presumably it comes from an unknown uncle whose solicitors confide to the legatee that the old man had a strange idea “that he had sold himself to the devil, and that his large fortune was one result of the bargain.” But who, with five millions to his name, would worry about an old man’s fancies? Certainly not Geoffrey Tempest. Probably no man.

On the very night that the intimation of his good fortune reaches him, the newly made millionaire receives a call from Prince Lucio Rimânez, whose person is beautiful, whose conversation is witty to brilliance, whose wealth is unlimited, and whose age is mysterious. The meeting takes place very suitably in the dark, and the hands of the pair meet in the gloom “quite blandly and without guidance”; and we soon hear from the lips of the Prince that it is a most beautiful dispensation of nature that “honest folk should be sacrified in order to provide for the sustenance of knaves!” and that the devil not only drives the world whip in hand, but that he manages his team very easily.