‘Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century’ is a collection of essays about a novelist who once was the ‘second most famous Englishwoman in the world’ after Queen Victoria and whose books broke every previous sales record. The essays account for Corelli’s popularity and reintroduce her to a new generation of readers.

With the purpose of introducing Marie Corelli to a new generation of readers and of reconsidering her works for generations familiar with them, ‘Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century’ demonstrates how provocative Corelli was as a public figure and how controversial and paradoxical were the views about womanhood and the supernatural pitched in her novels. This collection of original essays focuses on three major battles that engaged Corelli: her personal and public contentions, her mercurial constructions of gender and resistance to the New Woman modality and her untenable reconciliation of science with the supernatural. Corelli was often fighting several fronts at the same time; she rarely was not at war with someone including herself.

Introduction, Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier; 1. Stratford-upon-Avon’s ‘Great Little Lady’, Nick Leigh Birch; 2. From ‘Girl Alone’ to ‘Genius’: Corelli’s Transforming Epistolary Rhetoric, Colleen Morrissey; 3. Marie Corelli, the Public Sphere and Public Opinion, Julia Kuehn; 4. ‘The Muses Are Women; So Are the Fates’: Corelli’s Literary Masquerade(s), Sarah E. Maier; 5. The Devil & Miss Corelli: Re-gendering the Diabolical and the Redemptive in ‘The Sorrows of Satan’, Julianne Smith; 6. Muscular Christianity Unbound: Masculinity in ‘Ardath’, Gareth Hadyk-DeLodder; 7. Over Her (Un)dead Body: Gender Politics, Mediumship and Feminist Spiritual Theology in the Works of Marie Corelli, Carol Margaret Davison; 8. ‘The Story of a Dead Self’: The Theosophical Novels of Marie Corelli, Brenda Ayres; 9. ‘Something Vile in the Composition’: Marie Corelli’s ‘Ziska’, Decadent Portraiture and the New Woman, Angie Blumberg; Index.

With the purpose of introducing Marie Corelli to a new generation of readers and of reconsidering her works for generations familiar with them, ‘Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century’ demonstrates how provocative Corelli was as a public figure and how controversial and paradoxical were the views about womanhood and the supernatural pitched in her novels. This collection of original essays focuses on three major battles that engaged Corelli: her personal and public contentions, her mercurial constructions of gender and resistance to the New Woman modality and her untenable reconciliation of science with the supernatural. Corelli was often fighting several fronts at the same time; she rarely was not at war with someone including herself.