Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture & The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers.

Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture, by Annette R. Federico; pp. 201. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000, $30.00, [pounds sterling]22.50.

The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers, by Teresa Ransom; pp. vii + 247. Phoenix Mill and New York: Sutton Publishing, 1999, [pounds sterling]25.00, $39.95.

"A fairy stirring up the world with a wand dipped in ink." So wrote Robert Hitchens admiringly of Marie Corelli (1855-1924), who in her lifetime became Britain's top-selling novelist and a worldwide celebrity. Corelli and her work stirred up anything but lukewarm responses. Her novels (thirty-one in all) won adoring fans from all ranks of society; Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, and William Gladstone were among her ardent admirers, as were working-class readers who named their baby daughters after Corelli heroines. Corelli's most popular novel, The Sorrows of Satan (1895) is considered the first modern bestseller; it sold more copies upon its initial publication than any previous English novel. By Corelli's death in 1924, Sorrows had gone through sixty reprintings and was adapted for film by D. W. Griffith in 1926. The devotion of Corelli's readers was matched only by the loathing of literary reviewers, who repeatedly lambasted what they regarded as Corelli's pandering to the degraded tastes of the masse s. Her books--fascinating hybrids of romance, science fiction, adventure, historical narrative, dream-vision, and sermon--brimmed with purple prose, revolted …