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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.
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"Idol of Suburbia is not only a discerning study
of Marie Corelli--the most widely popular British novelist
of the late-Victorian and Edwardian years--but also a model
of readable and intelligent cultural criticism. Annette
Federico's close focus on selected issues is especially
useful in treating visual culture, conflicts over the
meaning of realism, the creation of a feminine aesthetic,
the gendering of modernism, and the interaction of mass
readership with literary reputation."
--Sally Mitchell, Temple University
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