Marie Corelli is best known as a novelist, but was always a poet at heart, composing on her strongest passions, whether for love, nature, God, or country.
This volume collects poems from across her bestselling books and across her career, curated by Brenda Vyver, her her 'companion' of 40 years, who she left everything to when she died, and who is buried alongside her in a twin grave. It is perhaps worth noting that Brenda drove much of Corelli's work, which ran heavy to erotic descriptions of women.
Corelli was the Victorian romance author who outsold Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling put together. Despite critics labelling her as "as "the favourite of the common multitude", she was a favourite of Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria and William Gladstone. She was the only author invited to the coronation of Edward VII, and her friends included Mark Twain, Ouida, the Empress Frederick of Germany, and Alfred Tennyson. Her often darkly romantic works tried to reconcile Christianity with mystical ideas such as reincarnation and astral projection.
A true character, Corelli claimed that she had warned the finders of the tomb of Tutankhamun about the "dire punishment" likely to occur to those who rifle Egyptian tombs, claiming to cite an ancient book that indicated that poisons had been left after burials. She . She was associated at some point with the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis; a mystical Rosicrucian group, and her books were a part of the foundation of today's corpus of esoteric philosophy.
"a woman of deplorable talent who imagined that she was a genius, and was accepted as a genius by a public to whose commonplace sentimentalities and prejudices she gave a glamorous setting." - Grant Allen
"the imagination of a Poe with the style of an Ouida and the mentality of a nursemaid." -James Agate
