This article brings to light new empirical evidence of what fin-de-siècle readers thought of Marie Corelli's controversial popular fiction – the opinions of both her supporters and detractors. It compares Corelli's conception of her readership with the broad cross-section of society her readers actually represented. The appeal of her novels ranged from their class critique, idealising moral didacticism, and spiritual and religious speculation to the imaginative fantasy of plots which delivered seemingly uplifting entertainment. Such attractions prompted some supporters to conceive of sympathetic readings of her texts in similar terms to Corelli herself. Reactions to Thelma (1887) demonstrate how supportive readers self-confidently rejected critics’ denigration of both their reading material and their reading abilities. Others found Corelli's satirical pastiche of realism self-undermining and lacking fairness and moral consistency. The result was that readers argued about the worth of such popular fiction, their debate being recorded in the pages of local newspapers and discernible also in letters to Corelli herself, encouraged by an age of growing authorial celebrity. This article demonstrates how the controversial nature of Corelli's popular fiction played its part in stimulating readers to publicly voice their self-confident, independent, and thoughtful judgments.
Stephen Edwards (Sat,) studied this question.