Marie Corelli

Marie Corelli (1855–1924) was, for a time, the best-selling novelist in Britain, adored by the public and scorned by critics. Her fervid romances fused melodrama with spiritualism and pseudo-science, A Romance of Two Worlds imagines an electric ‘divine’ energy and interplanetary travel of the soul, and The Sorrows of Satan was a phenomenon. A striking, now-neglected figure at the mystical edge of Victorian speculative fiction.