The Angel in the Publishing House: Authorial Self-Fashioning, Gender, and Orphanhood in Marie Corelli's Innocent

Abstract

The best-selling Victorian novelist Marie Corelli (1855–1924) is a literary figure enmeshed in contradictions. Famously refusing to identify as a New Woman writer, she was known for her womanly heroines and her own ultra-feminine style of dress. She shunned press photographers and ferociously protected her privacy. But Corelli was equally ferocious in her ambition for literary success and fame, and she does not altogether fit in with those women writers of the nineteenth century who staged an outer show of dominant domestic vocation and cast their fame as an unsought consequence of their natural genius. Through examination of Corelli's self-fashioned orphanhood, this article seeks to highlight her as an example of a fin-de-siècle woman writer who resisted consignment to the transgressive New Woman image and more traditional gender roles. Taking Corelli's critically neglected 1914 novel Innocent: Her Fancy and His Fact as its focal point, and analysing the success of her self-fashioning by drawing upon the remembrances of members of Corelli's local community in Stratford-upon-Avon, recorded as part of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Oral History Project, this article explores the ways in which Corelli strengthened her orphan identity in her later fiction and, in so doing, strove to legitimise female authorship and celebrity.