Lecture X.--Late Victorian Scribblers

     

     


    Gentileschi, Artemisia (Italian, approx. 1593-1653)


     

    Late Victorian Scribblers - the Sensationalists

    Sensation Novels were Victorian books featuring dramatic, thrilling events. Their plots often revolved around sinister conspiracies, hidden secrets, crimes, and villainous schemers. The events in Sensation Fiction clearly have a lot to do with mystery fiction. However, sometimes Sensation Novels take the form of a mystery story, and sometimes they don't. 



    The common assertion that the Victorian Sensation Novel was a transitional form to the true mystery cannot be supported. It is at best a first cousin. While it flourished in the 1860's, true detective tales were being created by such non-Sensation Novelists as Harriet Prescott Spofford in America, the police casebook writers in England, and James Skipp Borlase and Mary Fortune in Australia. Even before these works, Poe's 1840's stories were true detective stories in the modern sense. These genuine tales are presented by their authors with complete "generic casualness" (to coin a term), as if mysteries solved by detectives were the most familiar things in the world. There is little sign in the texts that the reader is being asked to make some radical leap. These works suggest that readers were already comfortable with the idea of a detective story, and many of its conventions. 

    If the Sensation Novel is not an ancestor to real mystery fiction, it does contain some truly brilliant works of literature. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White is especially outstanding. And the Sensation Novel as a form has ties to the Brontës and their great novels. Also, sometimes the Sensation Novel intersects and produces works that conform to the paradigms of true mystery fiction. Examples: Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, and some of Mrs. Henry Wood's mystery tales. 

    Sensation novels tend to have such features as secrets from the past, often involving people's identities written records of key moments of people's lives: wedding certificates, gravestones, parish registers, inscriptions in books well-to-do women with secrets criticism of socially approved roles for men and women, and ideas of femininity victimization of socially naive young people, by older, more experienced criminals criminal conspiracies, often involving major life transitions: marriage, death and inheritance marriage as a sinister event, leading one to being fleeced of money, then killed crimes which the reader sees unfold from beginning to end; rather than being solved after the fact, detective story style, characters who serve as doubles of each other's dreams, mind controlling drugs, the use of mirrors and paintings to suggest hidden truths -  especially about the villains, satire of the religiously active ....


    In Sensation novels, we often see the crime being committed, from start to end. It is a whole process. In the definitely different tradition consisting of Poe, the Casebook writers, and most future detective stories, we open with the crime already committed, and the detective trying to solve it.  Sensation novels tend to be filled with written records of key moments of people's lives: wedding certificates, gravestones, parish registers, inscriptions in books. Just as the mirrors and paintings popular in Sensation novels constitute an imitation life, so do records seem to be a life parallel to our own, a half life created on paper and stone. These records have power over our real life. In fact in Victorian society, they seem to be more powerful than our actual life. If they say we have a certain identity, then we have that identity. If they say we inherit money, we inherit the money. They constitute a shadow version of our lives, one controlled by society, and which controls our own real life. These records constitute a twilight version of our own lives. 



    Marie Corelli

    The Victorian Era produced some excellent writing by women, and was a period of great literary production in general.  We have seen how the Romantic influence persisted into the Victorian era, producing such fine poets as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and novelists such as the Brontes.  The latter part of the 19th Century also saw writers like George Eliot receiving positive critical acclaim (kind of).  But this was also a time when the growth of "popular" literature was assured by a growing readership, educated enough to at least want good pot-boilers.  Following in the footsteps of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, we have Bram Stoker's Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Moreover, since it was possible to make a living at this "trash" writing [although not have critical acclaim], many women were part of the new book scene.  Although you probably weren't aware that women had written these books, you may recognize the characters and ideas (like our Frankenstein monster) that have surfaced in subsequent movies and stories. One example below:

    Paramount Pictures 
    A Cosmopolitan Production, 1922
    Written by Luther Reed from a story by Marie Corelli
    Sets by Joseph Urban 

    Directed by Albert Capellani and Robert C. Vignola 

    Cast:
    Marion Davies, Maclyn Arbuckle, Pedro de Cordoba, Forrest Stanley, Gypsy O'Brien.

    Synopsis:
    Marion Davies plays Diana May, who is in love with a sailor named Cleeve. Her Father wants
    her married into British nobility and a scientist looking for the fountain of youth falls in love
    with her. The scientist tricks her into thinking Cleeve has married, so she abandons her plans to
    wed him, only to discover 20 years later that it was a lie. She finds the scientist and he restores
    her youth but spurns the now married Cleeve. Diana wakes up, the preceeding has been a dream! She and Cleeve are married. 

    Unknown Writer of the Week:  Marie Corelli 

    We have talked about the way that so many of our writers look mousy and retiring (and were retiring).  Not so Marie Corelli.  She understood the value of a good hat - and she was one of the first women writers to self-promote.  Of course, she had to self-promote, since no one in the literary world would give her the time of day.

                 

    The following is a book jacket description for Annette Federico's book about Marie Corelli:

    Idol of Suburbia:
    Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian
    Literary Culture

    Annette R. Federico
    192 pages • 6 x 9 • 13 illustrations
    ISBN 0-8139-1915-0 • $30.00 cloth

    Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was the most popular novelist of the turn of the century, outselling Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle by the thousands. For thirty years she was ridiculed by reviewers and the literary elite--Edmund Gosse dismissed her as "that little milliner"--but these opinions had no impact on her mass appeal. In 1895, with The Sorrows of Satan, she broke all previous publishing records, and by 1906 a Corelli novel sold 100,000 copies a year.

    Idol of Suburbia returns Marie Corelli to conversations about the late-Victorian and Edwardian literary world. As Annette R. Federico points out, Corelli's participation in the cultural life of her time was highly creative, combative, and contradictory. Her ongoing war with highbrow literary critics and her management of her own image illuminate continuing debates about literary value, class hegemony, and gender politics at the
    fin de siecle.

    In examining Corelli's celebrity and her protean literary talents in the context of a changing book market, Federico reveals the profusion of the late-Victorian literary imagination. She analyzes Corelli's participation in literary decadence, feminism, and New Woman fiction, and she discusses how seriously we should take her aesthetic and its literary influence. Federico asks why heterosexual love seems pathological in so many of Corelli's novels and assesses the validity of biographical and psychoanalytic explanations of her celibacy and her lifelong companionship with another woman.

    Idol of Suburbia is the first full-length study to address these questions and to set Corelli within the framework of literary history and contemporary critical theory.

    From George Landow's Victorian Web:

    Marie Corelli (real name "Mary Mackay") was probably born somewhere in London in May of 1855. Her origins are not known for certain, but she was probably the illegitimate daughter of Dr. Charles Mackay and his mistress, Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Mills, whom Dr. Mackay married after his first wife died. After her first book, A Romance of Two Worlds, was published in 1886, she became the best selling author in England, and the favorite of Queen Victoria, who ordered a collection of all Marie's books. Despite the savage attacks of critics, her books often broke sales records. She was the only author invited to the coronation of Edward VII, and counted among her friends Mark Twain, Ouida, the Empress Frederick of Germany, and many other writers and members of royalty. Tennyson wrote her praises for her work Ardath (1889), a book which did not sell very well relatively, but the one Marie had always considered her best. 

    Marie Corelli's books are imaginative, philosophical and mystical. She took it upon herself to cure the world of all its social ills. Among her best works are Thelma (1887), Wormwood (1890), Barabbas (1893), The Sorrows of Satan (1895), The Master Christian (1900), Temporal Power (1902), The Life Everlasting (1911), and The Secret Power (1921). After W.W.I, her books were considered out-of-date and sales and interest declined. She died in 1924.

    1886 A Romance of Two Worlds. London: Bentley. 
    1886 Vendetta. London: Bentley. 
    1887 Thelma. London: Bentley. 
    1889 Ardath. London: Bentley. 
    1890 Wormwood. London: Bentley. 
    1892 The Soul of Lilith. London: Bentley. 
    1892 The Silver Domino (published anonymously). London: Lamleys. 
    1893 Barabbas. London: Methuen. 
    1895 The Sorrows of Satan. London: Methuen. 
    1896 The Murder of Delicia. London: Skeffington. 
    1896 The Mighty Atom. London: Hutchinson. 
    1896 Cameos. London: Hutchinson. 
    1897 Ziska. London: Arrowsmith. 
    1898 The Song of Miriam and Other Stories (Repackage of Cameos) 
    1898 The Modern Marriage Market (with others) 
    1900 Jane. London: Hutchinson. 
    1900 Boy. London: Hutchinson. 
    1900 The Master Christian. London: Methuen. 
    1901 The Passing of A Great Queen 
    1902 Temporal Power. London: Methuen. 
    1902 A Christmas Greeting 
    1904 God's Good Man. London: Methuen. 
    1904 The Strange Visitation of Josiah McNason 
    1905 Free Opinions. London: Constable. 
    1906 The Treasure of Heaven. London: Constable. 
    1908 Holy Orders. London: Methuen. 
    1908 The Kybalion (Anonymously with others) 
    1910 The Devil's Motor (from A Christmas Greeting) 
    1911 The Life Everlasting. London: Methuen. 
    1914 Innocent. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 
    1918 The Young Diana. London: Hutchinson. 
    1919 My Little Bit. London: Collins. 
    1920 A Love of Long Ago. London: Methuen. 
    1921 The Secret Power. London: Methuen. 
    1923 Love and The Philosopher. London: Methuen. 

    Posthumous Publications

    1925 Open Confession. London: Hutchinson. 
    1925 Poems. London: Hutchinson. 

    Free E-texts of Marie Corelli's Stories

    excerpt from The Mighty Atom by Marie Corelli

    A HEAVY storm had raged all day on the north coast of Devon. Summer had worn the garb of winter in a freakish fit of mockery and masquerade; and even among the sheltered orchards of the deeply-embowered valley of Combmartin, many a tough and gnarled branch of many a sturdy apple-tree laden with reddening fruit, had been beaten to the ground by the fury of the blast and the sweeping gusts of rain. Only now, towards late afternoon, were the sullen skies beginning to clear. The sea still lashed the rocks with angry thuds of passion, but the strength of the wind was gradually sinking into a mere breeze, and a warm saffron light in the west showed where the sun, obscured for so many hours, was about to hide his glowing face altogether for the night, behind the black vizor of our upward-moving earth. The hush of the gloaming began to permeate nature; flowers, draggled with rain, essayed to lift their delicate stems from the mould where they had been bowed prone and almost broken,--and a little brown bird fluttering joyously out of a bush where it had taken shelter from the tempest, alighted on a window-sill of one of the nearest human habitations it could perceive, and there piped a gentle roundelay for the cheering and encouragement of those within before so much as preening a feather.

    The Sorrows of Satan

    London, 1895, and the Devil is searching for someone morally strong enough to resist temptation, but there seems little chance he will succeed. Britain is all but totally corrupt. The aristocracy is financially and spiritually bankrupt; church leaders no longer believe in God; Victorian idealism has been banished from literature and life; and sexual morality is being undermined by the pernicious doctrines of the `New Woman'.

    The Sorrows of Satan (1895) was one of the first modern bestsellers and was influential in establishing some of the major trends in twentieth-century popular fiction.



    "I never married because there was no need.. I have three pets
    at home which answer the same purpose as a husband: I have a dog
    which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon,
    and a cat that comes home late at night." - Marie Corelli

and our American Cousins

Harriet Prescott Spofford

In a Cellar (1859) 
The Amber Gods (1860) 
Circumstance (1860) 
In The Maguerriwock (1868) 
The Moonstone Mass (1868) 
The Godmothers (1896) 

Rebecca Harding Davis

"Life in the Iron Mills" (1861) 

 

Continue with Lecture X.

 

 

Literature 45  - Women in Literature :  

Marjorie C. Luesebrink, MFA


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