Joanna Turner is a first-year PhD student at Loughborough University. Her thesis explores the filial relationship between fin-de-siècle popular fiction and mid nineteenth-century literature. Joanna is interested in how fin-de-siècle writing interprets and modifies earlier literary constructs of the domestic. Her research is focused on the life and work of Marie Corelli. Joanna tweets as @coppertapestry
What better way to get to know your supervisory team than to embark upon a research-inspired road trip! My supervisors, Dr Sarah Parker and Dr Anne-Marie Beller, have already made me feel very much at home at Loughborough University so, I am delighted when they offer to accompany me on an exploratory visit to some archives on my list.
We choose a biting December day for our visit to Stratford-Upon-Avon. Turning onto the High Street, we’re blasted with the scent of roasted chestnuts. ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ emanates from an accordion. The pork pie seller sports a handlebar moustache, waistcoat and fob-watch, whilst a lady selling artisan gin wears a mop-cap and crisp white apron. The Victorian Christmas Market is in full sway in Shakespeare’s town, and the tourists are loving it. The tills are ringing, but Bard-inspired literary tourists may ask ‘what do the Victorians have to do with Stratford-Upon-Avon?’ The answer partly lies in the purpose of our visit. We are exploring the life and pastimes of one-time Stratford resident Marie Corelli, the author of the first modern bestseller.[1]
Marie Corelli (1855-1924) authored twenty-five novels, and numerous short stories and articles. At her height she outstripped the combined annual sales of her fiercest literary rivals, H.G. Wells, Hall Caine, and Mrs Humphry Ward.[2] Corelli could boast Queen Victoria as being at the top of her subscription list, and the reach of her celebrity went to the extremities of the empire and across the Atlantic. For a diminutive person, Corelli was larger-than-life, eccentric yet exacting – always guarded over her public persona. Her popularity rose with the emergence of the single volume novel and began to ebb away during the first World War.[3] Corelli was the subject of eight biographies over the course of the twentieth century and has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, with an issue of the journal Women’s Writing dedicated to her.[4] Corelli was named ‘Shakespeare’s Champion’ by Stratford historian Jann Tracy, in a study that records how the author worked as an early conservationist, using influence and wealth to preserve buildings connected to Stratford’s literary heritage.[5] Tracy demonstrates that without Corelli, much of the historic nature of the Bard’s town would have been lost to unsympathetic early twentieth-century town planning.
The first stop on our Corelli tour is the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which houses the town Record office and Corelli archive. It is situated on Henley Street, a resplendent mix of Tudor, Georgian and Victorian architecture. In 1903 Corelli campaigned for the character of Henley Street to be preserved when the Hornby cottages (home of Shakespeare’s family) were under threat from demolition by an adversarial town council.[6] These cottages now house the Birthplace Trust shop. After a warm welcome and being shown into the reading room, we are thrilled to handle a proof copy of Corelli’s Vendetta,[7] and the MS of her 1895 sales-buster, The Sorrows of Satan.[8] It is fascinating to see the deterioration in Corelli’s handwriting as she progressed with her novel (something the best intentioned of New Year journal-keepers will appreciate!).
We walk back through the market. Corelli’s mark is everywhere. The author paid for the removal of stucco from buildings on the High Street to reveal Tudor timbers and bought ‘Firs Gardens’ for the town to use in perpetuity. Corelli suggested the creation of the Stratford Conservation Guild and was an active committee member from its founding in 1913.[9] She arranged the renovation of the ‘Harvard House’ and used her business contacts to fund its subsequent purchase.[10] Through Corelli’s resourcefulness the house was dedicated to the famous American University with which it has family connections, the affiliation continuing to this day.
Our second archive visit is to Mason Croft, current home of the Shakespeare Institute and part of the University of Birmingham, but more pertinent to us, Corelli’s home from 1901 to the end of her life. Corelli and her lifelong companion Bertha Vyver acquired Mason Croft and the adjoining Trinity College with the project of sensitively renovating them as one home. Some of their alterations can still be seen today. We are met by librarian Kate Welch, who generously gives us a tour of the building and grounds. Kate shows us the music room with specially commissioned plasterwork which intertwines the initials of Marie and Bertha, and Corelli’s gatehouse-folly in the grounds.
The archive holds treasure, in the form of the MS of Corelli’s The Life Everlasting.[11] Throughout the institute, there is a sense of a place that lives and breathes Shakespeare scholarship, but we recognise it exists because of Corelli’s dedication to preserving the Tudor history of Stratford-Upon-Avon.
As the day draws to a close, we walk the short distance from Mason Croft to Corelli’s final resting place. Seeing the sensitively restored white marble angel at twilight is poignant. [12] We’ve spent the day reading Corelli’s handwriting, walking through her one-time home and seeing conservation work she’d intended to outlive her. But it is viewing this angel tribute, commissioned by her constant and faithful ‘Ber’ that makes Marie Corelli all the more real to us.
So, as the tourists on the Shakespeare trail enjoy the seeming incongruence of a Victorian styled Christmas in the shadow of half-timbered houses, we appreciate how different the town could have looked without the intervention of its second-most famous literary celebrity.
With thanks to the staff at the reading room of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and to Kate Welch at the Shakespeare Institute Library. (Photographs, Anne-Marie Beller)
[1] Ransom, Teresa, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1999).
[2] McDowell, Margaret, ‘Marie Corelli’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists, 1890–1929: Traditionalists (Detroit, Michigan: Gale, 1985. 82–9) p.84
[3] For further reading Annette Federico’s Idol of Suburbia (2000) conveys the wonderful complexity of Corelli’s life, and works to place her in the context of literary history and discourses of Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction.
[4] Women’s Writing 13.2 (June 2006)
[5] Tracy, Jann, Marie Corelli: Shakespeare’s Champion (Walking Stork Publications, 2017)
[6] Tracy, p.24-5
[7] Corelli, Marie, Vendetta, (London: Bentley and Son, 1886)
[8] Corelli, Marie, The Sorrows of Satan, (London: Methuen, 1895)
[9] Tracy, p. 47
[10] Ransom, p. 168
[11] Corelli, Marie, The Life Everlasting, (London: Methuen, 1911)
[12] Nick Birch, Corelli enthusiast and custodian of mariecorelli.org.uk fundraised for the restoration of Corelli’s grave in 2017. He also maintains the famous Corelli Gondola, still afloat upon the river Avon.
The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates 