MARIE CORELLI

Southland Times, Issue 24153, 15 June 1940, Page 15

MARIE CORELLI

Critics Examine A New Portrait

If any best sellers of today need a skeleton at their feasts, a portrait of Marie Corelli might serve the purpose. Sixteen years after her death the most popular novelist of her time has not only ceased to be read; she has become a general laughing-stock. Her own inordinate conception of her merits never weakened. In her will she directed that her house at Stratford-on-Avon should be preserved intact, “as the home of a great English novelist,” for future generations to visit. But posterity, as Malcolm Elwin remarks in John o’ London’s Weekly, has vindicated the judgment of the reviewers who provoked her wrath by their criticisms. Memories of one of the most bizarre figures in our literary Jiistory have been revived by the appearance of George Bullock’s “Marie Correlli” (Constable). This volume depicts so strange a personality that The Times Literary Supplement describes it as far more interesting than her own books, and Robert Lynd, in The News Chronicle, confesses that he found it much more absorbing than “The Sorrows of Satan.” While commending, however, the biographical part of it, the reviewers seem a bit disappointed about its author’s attempt to show how it was that Marie Corelli acquired such an extraordinary vogue. Desmond MacCarthy, in The Sunday Times, thinks his criticism weak, especially through his failure to place her in relation to her times, and thus explain why her lurid vehemence once found favour even with readers capable of distinguishing between fustian and good cloth.

LITERARY DEFECTS Marie Corelli’s defects were certainly obvious to any person of literary judgment. The Times Literary Supplement declares that for aid in the telling of her stories (or her familiar story), for humanity in the characters, for beauty and fitness of language, for links with reality, the modern reader will look in vain, and adds that she was also lacking in both wit and humour. What, then, is there to say on the other side? Mr Bullock falls back upon her “passionate sincerity,” which scarcely seems an adequate explanation. Desmond MacCarthy suggests selfabandonment as nearer the mark. She was endowed, he says, with an extra dose of will and appetite and exuberant imagination, and driven to make demands upon life which only day dreams could satisfy. So whatever she wrote gushed unchecked and uncensored straight from the burning centre of her desires at the moment. In the opinion of the same critic there was one virtue which she undoubtedly possessed—pluck. Mr Elwin also notes her courage. One of the friendliest verdicts is that of Basil de Selincourt in The Manchester (~ uardian. He describes her as hardworking and full of noblest notions, and adds that, with a little more of brains and of self-knowledge, she might have become almost what she believed she was. The Scotsman, too, says that probably her imagination was overdeveloped and she lived in a world of fancy, but a sympathetic eye can discern in her character the qualities of generosity loyalty and kindness.