The childhood of Marie Corelli

I described some painful events in the life of the Queen of Victorian Best-sellers Marie Corelli recently. Writing about an episode in Rudyard Kipling's childhood gave me the idea of investigating Marie Corelli's childhood.

There is little information available and much confusion about her parentage. She deliberately muddied the water herself; she obscured her past with a fog of lies and deceit. We will never know for sure whether the Scottish poet, scholar and journalist Charles Mackay was her real father or, as she insisted, her adopted father. It is likely that her mother was a servant and Marie was born illegitimate. She would have seen this as a terrible disgrace, something to be ashamed of and kept hidden; she claimed Venetian blood and gave herself an Italian name in compensation and to hide her real parentage.

What we do know is that despite having a kind man as her official father, she was very unhappy as a child.

In her own words

According to Hebe Elsna in The Lonely Dreamer, Marie Corelli wrote to a friend, “I… was a most lonely and miserable girl! The days of my childhood were days of such intense and bitter suffering, that I never willingly look back on them, nor can I be reminded of them without indescribable pain.”

She could have been speaking for many other writers.

There is an extract from Marie's posthumously published book Open Confession to a Man from a Woman that is surely autobiographical:

"I was such a small and lonely creature; and my surroundings were those of cold indifferentism that sometimes surely verged on cruelty. I often think of how greatly older people are to blame in their treatment of sensitive children,- crushing all their aspirations by a look or a word... I grew up timid and frightened of all “superior” persons,- I had no consciousness of anything good or worthy in myself,- and the utter solitude of my soul was almost appalling in one so little and so young.”

There is much room for improvement in her grammar and punctuation, but she is sincere in her expression. It all sounds familiar; it could almost be Jane Eyre speaking.

She goes on to describe how she could escape her loneliness by reading. The suffering she endured forced her to seek solace and freedom in the world of books, just as it did with Charlotte Brontë and Rudyard Kipling.

Same game, different players.

There is no evidence that Marie was ever bullied, persecuted and beaten as Rudyard Kipling was; there is no evidence that she had the same awful experiences as a child that Charlotte Brontë did. So why did she claim to have been so unhappy?

Perhaps she felt the way she did because she was born mediumistic, disconnected and without any insulation so never felt safe, comfortable or at home in the world and with the people around her. 

She had no siblings or companions of her own age, but even if she had she might still have felt isolated and different.

Maybe she was poisoned by all the undercurrents, secrets and unfinished business in her family. They were impoverished, and she could have been affected by that too. There was a lot of pressure on her to acquire marketable skills so that she could earn her own living and support her father in his old age.

The same author reports that as a child, Marie had been told that she must never complain of feeling unwell. This too could have caused much suffering.

Success as compensation

From an early age, Marie Corelli was determined to be a Somebody. Her dreams of success were realised; she achieved great fame and fortune. Her novels at one time outsold the combined sales of her best known contemporaries, including Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Despite being despised by the critics and called a trashy romantic novelist, vulgar, sentimental and melodramatic, she wrote books that appealed to all levels of society from kitchen maids to queens. They may have contained much pseudo-science, pseudo-religion and pseudo-occultism, but this was what her public liked.

Queen Victoria, who asked to be sent copies of Corelli's new novels as they were published, Queen Victoria's daughter the Empress Frederick of Germany, Queen Alexandra,  the King of Italy and Prime Minister Gladstone are just a few of the many prominent people, including some fellow best-selling authors, who praised and admired her work.

Marie Corelli's life was one of luxury and ostentation, perhaps as an attempted compensation for both the deprivation of her childhood and sensed but unadmitted personal deficiencies. However, a glittering public image is not the real self, and attention-seeking, ego-gratifying activities are no substitute for any necessary inner work.

A gypsy once said to her, “Lonely child, lonely woman.” This was prophetic. She may have kept on writing partly to fill a void.

Marie Corelli today

Marie Corelli's name is almost forgotten now, but some of her books are still available and some of her work can be found on Project Gutenberg. Not many people will enjoy reading her books just for the story and her style and the bad writing are off-putting, but some of them are worth reading for ideas, quotations, clues, connections and examples of unseen influences. The Sorrows of Satan is more readable than many of the others.

The official date for Marie Corelli's birth is May 1st 1855, so today is her 162nd anniversary. Here are quotations from two of her books to mark the occasion: 

-No fame is actually worth much now-a-days,—because it is not classic fame, strong in reposeful old-world dignity,—it is blatant noisy notoriety merely...”

“Intellectual growth and advancement are seldom, if ever, associated with purely domestic comfort and tranquility.“

More quotations can be found here:

http://mariecorelli.org.uk/works/quotations.html