A novelist finds a public
Known as Mary Mackay before her literary career, she privately gave 1855 as her birth year. No securely identified birth certificate has settled the details of her birth. Her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, appeared in 1886 and drew spiritual speculation into a form accessible to readers of popular romance. By the time The Sorrows of Satan appeared in 1895, she knew both the scale of her readership and the hostility a successful popular novelist could provoke among reviewers.
In 1899 Corelli moved to Stratford-upon-Avon with her companion Bertha Vyver. She bought Mason Croft in 1901 and made the preservation of the town’s buildings a public cause. Her efforts helped save Harvard House on the High Street. Pamphlets, correspondence and local campaigns became another way for her to address a public, sometimes a sharply divided one.
Temptation in a modern setting
The Sorrows of Satan gives Geoffrey Tempest the two things he thinks he lacks as an author: wealth and access. His companion, Prince Lucio Rimânez, lets him see how the machinery of reputation works from the inside. Corelli later gave the devil a very different vehicle in The Devil’s Motor, where the noise and speed of the car become part of its driver’s destructive appeal.
