Gollum’s Mother: On Marie Corelli
lareviewofbooks.org | By Lili Loofbourow
IT'S DIFFICULT, even a century after her literary career began its decline, to talk about Marie Corelli without succumbing to a battery 
of adjectives. Often condemned as a hack and praised as a saint, Corelli was something altogether more interesting, a sort of Oscar Wilde in reverse. If Wilde’s lampoons show a certain tenderness toward human hypocrisy, the joke being that most everyone is terrible, Corelli’s satire, while no less affectionate, sides always with the angels. Hers is a sincere sarcasm. She was a flamboyant puritan, an antisuffragist cryptofeminist, and a defender of traditional morals who lived all her life with another woman. On a wall above the mantel in one of the main halls of Mason Croft, the house she shared with her lifelong companion Bertha Vyver, both women’s initials appear encircled by a wreath. The caption underneath reads “Amor Vincit.” (All-conquering love notwithstanding, it’s likely that Corelli’s relationship with Vyver remained platonic.)
Corelli ought to be well remembered as a late 19th-century publishing phenom alone: her book sales exceeded those of contemporaries H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling combined. Derided by critics and even her own biographers for being too sensational, and later by the public for writing herself into her own work like a kind of fin de siècle Mary Sue, Corelli’s real gift lay in combining exotic high fantasy themes with the prosaic cynicism of London society without quite capitulating to the formulae of either. She could even be called a cult leader of sorts: her first novel, a first-person narrative titled A Romance of Two Worlds, introduced something called the Electric Principle of Christianity, a well-theorized fictional religion that caught on like wildfire. Sales of the novel soared and the Electric Principle developed a dedicated following.
It’s difficult to reconcile Corelli’s current near-total obscurity with her once vast literary footprint. Loyal readers named their children after her. Pages of her novels were found in the Boer trenches. Her fan base began with the eccentrics at society’s lower end and went all the way up to Queen Victoria. Corelli was the monarch’s favorite author, and if you think about it this makes perfect sense: her books are high flown, aspirational, unsubtle, workmanlike, idealistic, rich in pseudo-Shakespearean ruminations, pleasurable in an instructive way, siding with the virtuous but fully understanding — and reveling in — the value of a good villain: perfect bedtime reading for English queens. (If the genre of “high fantasy” takes place not in this world but in a richly-rendered imaginary universe, what more perfectly represents it than Queen Victoria, who politely owned and governed half a world she never even saw?) Read More...
of the outmoded. If fairy tales, as a genre, are the opposite of modernity, why is it, then, that they have survived thousands of years? One answer is that they deal with things that are timeless and universal, basic aspects of the human condition – offering the reader, in Tolkien’s words, consolation, the recovery of a clear view, and the chance to escape the bleakness of the quotidian. Another is that, being originally transmitted orally, they have no definite shape and are thus infinitely adaptable to the needs and interests of their specific audiences. We tend to forget this, since the most successful recorders of fairy tales, men like Charles Perrault, Antoine Galland, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or Joseph Jacobs, have given their tales permanent shapes, turning what once were protean entities into classical texts with a canonical status.
meeting with the aged founder of Russian Formalism—still curious and spry, “like an 86-year-old boy”—in his cramped, two-room Moscow apartment. It was 1978, and Vitale’s Russian friends, she recalls, regarded Shklovsky as a relic. They had not forgiven him for bowing to official pressure almost forty years earlier and recanting Formalism’s most impetuous, insurrectionary and implicitly anti-Soviet precepts: namely, that art is untethered to dogma, state or any apparent “content” and that, as he once put it, “a writer should never be yoked to a trellis and forced to salute.” When Vitale asked him why young Russians considered him “a writer, so to speak, of the establishment,” the blood left Shklovsky’s face. He shook his cane and, yelling, kicked her out into the cold.
aspect, from the most specific details of the curriculum to the broadest questions about its purpose, is in crisis. It is a seamless garment of crisis: If you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels.
enviable clarity. But is it true? Orwell argues that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words.”
from the play by Maxim Gorky, was showing one evening in 1940 at the Apollo Theatre in Times Square and the young Columbia footballer sat in the balcony and felt moved by the image of the sainted figure who emerges out of despair. In time to come, Kerouac the writer would appear as a pioneer fixated on the journey west, but it was another direction, the journey down, that really captured him.
of Greek and Roman antiquity, The Classical Tradition is a low-cost Wunderkammer, a vast cabinet of curiosities. Take the entry on the asterisk: you learn that this ubiquitous critical sign, named from the Greek for “small star,” originated in Ptolemaic Alexandria, where the great textual scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium and his student Aristarchus of Samothrace used them to mark repeated lines in the Iliad and Odyssey. Several centuries later the prolific (and self-mutilated) Christian theologian Origen began to employ asterisks in a different way, to signal the omission of certain passages in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This usage gradually spread as a sign of something missing or hidden, and hence—at the end of a complex trail that winds through classical editions, Bibles, and pornography—when you type your password on the computer, the letters and numbers often show up as a string of asterisks.
Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.