Marie Corelli: The Writer and the Woman

“Keep a brave heart. You are steadily rising. People recognize that you are an artist working with love, not a machine producing novels against bank-notes, with no interest in its work. But keep a good heart, little lady. It is the way with people of imagination and keen sensibility to have their moments of depression.... I believe you will emerge out of all this with your brave little spirit, and I shall rejoice to see you successful, because I believe you will not be spoilt by success.”

Thus wrote George Bentley, the publisher, to Marie Corelli on November 15th, 1888. At that time only three of her books had appeared—“A Romance of Two Worlds,” “Vendetta,” and “Thelma”—and she was engaged upon the latter portion of “Ardath.” She was in the spring of her career, probing the Unknown and the Unseen, the Long Ago and the Future, with daring flights of fancy that had already set the world wondering.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bentley watched over his protégée with a care that was almost parental. A number of extracts from his wise and helpful letters will be given in the course of this work; and the reader will not fail to observe that there was very much more in Mr. Bentley’s attitude than a mere desire to coin pretty expressions for the benefit of a charming young woman possessed of undeniable genius. He could be very candid in his criticisms, when occasion demanded, but his tact was unfailing, and his sympathy boundless. He was one of an old school of which but few examples now remain. He was a personal friend as well as a publisher, one who could regard an author as something more than a creature with a money-producing imagination. He was of the school that produced Blackwood, Murray, Smith—the famous scions of those houses—and others whose names have ever been uttered with affection by those men and women of the pen who had dealings with them. One has only to peruse the correspondence which passed between John Blackwood, on the one side, and G. H. Lewes and George Eliot, on the other, to appreciate in full the power of encouragement and the influence a publisher possesses in his negotiations with a writer of promise.

Of a truth, Marie Corelli had need of such a friend, for her early career, as everybody knows, was thorny and troublous. A publisher greedy for a golden harvest might have prevailed upon her to write quickly, and, as a natural consequence, not at her best, for the certain gains which such work would produce in abundance. Mr. Bentley deprecated undue hurry. “You are now a person,” he says in one of his characteristic letters, “of sufficient importance not to have to depend on appearance or non-appearance. You have shown not only talent, but versatility, and that you are not a mere mannerist with one idea repeating itself in each book; consequently, when you next come, there will be expectation.”