Victorian Periodicals Review

"I do not write in a ladylike or effeminate way": The Vivian Clifford Experiment of 1874 and Corelli's Use of Masculine Pseudonyms

In a letter to the publishing house of Blackwood on January 21, 1874, much referred to in Corelli biographies, a not-yet-twenty-year-old Minnie Mackay wrote, "I am a constant contributor to the St. James's Magazine and other London Periodicals, under my nom-de-plume of Vivian Erle Clifford which nom-de-plume I desire to retain."⁸ Teresa Ransom takes from this that Mackay "invented not only her name but her achievements," whereas Masters asserts that the letter was a dupe designed to impress the editor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.⁹ Assuming that Mackay exaggerates, Masters opines that she would not "shrink from the odd lie which might help her."¹⁰ Neither of these biographers, nor the scholars who subsequently refer to this early correspondence, have investigated the possibility that the young author was telling the truth. In fact, at the time of her letter to Blackwood's, Mackay had received acceptance for two pieces in the St. James's Magazine, and after her adoptive father had generously provided a new poem for the inaugural issue of the London Sketchbook, it followed that the editor, James Mortimer (previously of the London Figaro), would look favourably upon the writing of another member of the Mackay family.¹¹ Minnie Mackay was clearly hoping that, by the time Blackwood's saw her letter, her publications would be readily available in the February periodicals. The pieces, written by Mackay as Vivian Clifford, are now the earliest known writings of the woman who was to become Marie Corelli.

Mackay's first published work as Clifford is a seven-stanza love poem entitled "Elise." Marking the beginning of a writing career that would endure for fifty years, it was printed in the February 1874 issue of St. James's Magazine:

In visions of the star-crown'd night,When earth lay wrapt in dark and dreamful ease,Upon my ears there fell a whisper light:Only one word—"Elise."¹² [End Page 112]

This opening stanza determines the structure of the poem, with the word "Elise" taking the final word of alternate stanzas and completing the poem itself. The speaker, a lover jilted long ago, reflects upon a recent meeting with Elise, where her coldness is opposed to his undying love. Peppered with Corelli's signature exclamation marks, the poem has a tone of passionate desperation and desire, tropes that Corelli later developed within her early novels Vendetta! (1886) and Thelma (1887).

In March 1874, Clifford appeared for a second time, in the New Monthly Magazine, with the poem "Ernestine," which utilises both the style and themes of "Elise." With twice the number of stanzas and two pages dedicated to it, the name "Ernestine" is used more forcefully as epistrophe, an almost catechistic repetition that echoes throughout the poem, as this speaker who wronged a long-dead beloved is haunted by the remembrance of her.¹³ Julia Kuehn identifies Corelli's "compulsion to repeat" in her prose and how this reflects her presentation and idealisation of love.¹⁴ Here, in Clifford's poetry, a dependence on Freudian structures of repetition is evident and abundant.¹⁵ In April 1874, St. James's Magazine published Clifford again: a longer poem entitled "Love Prepared for Battle" written in blank verse, with a mysterious dedication to E. R. B.¹⁶ Love, here, is personified as a male figure fighting the evils of the world, which are also personified as "Malice and Jealousy and eager Spite."¹⁷ Clifford again deploys exclamation and introduces the device of textual emphasis. This is another idiosyncrasy of Corelli's prose, as seen, for example, in the underlining used in the letter above. The Clifford pseudonym seems designed to protect the daughter of a poet from potential rejection as she tested the appetite of the periodicals for her own compositions.

During this period, Mackay-as-Clifford was also experimenting with writing in a satirical style. In February 1874 (at the same time that "Elise" appeared in St. James's Magazine), she published an observation of modern society entitled "An Enquiry into the Nature of Fools" in the London Sketchbook. Following this, between March and July 1874, the London Sketchbook published Clifford's series "Daisy and I," which consisted of five linked sketches depicting a socially unequal courtship. Both texts employ a lightness of tone and satirical quality that is evident in Corelli's My Wonderful Wife (1889). Until now, this novella has been viewed as an anomaly within the Corelli canon for its attempts at humour and irony and its critical perspective on courtship and marriage.¹⁸ These new discoveries reposition My Wonderful Wife as part of a distinct genre of satirical prose within Corelli's oeuvre. Clifford's texts prove, contrary to what biographers have assumed, that Mackay had every reason to approach Blackwood's with confidence in 1874. Indeed, during the six months following that letter, she saw her work in print every single month. Whilst [End Page 113] Mackay may not have been successful in winning Blackwood's favour, she had proven to herself that her work was of publishable standard. Her self-guided literary apprenticeship had begun with an exercise in market penetration and formal experimentation, and she had succeeded on both counts.

Most interestingly, it is only on reading "Daisy and I" that it becomes clear that the pseudonym Vivian Clifford is masculine. The narrator of "Daisy and I" is Clifford himself, identified in the first conversation between the lovers where Daisy remarks, "O, don't be absurd, Vivian!"¹⁹ None of the biographers who discuss Mackay's letter to Blackwood's question the gender of Clifford or ponder whether Mackay could have been writing under a male or androgynous pseudonym. This can be attributed to their twentieth-century perspectives and the modern gendered usage of the name Vivian. But Victorian readers were unlikely to have been confused. In the nineteenth century, Vivian was generally a masculine name; over time, it became increasingly popular for both genders, gradually shifting towards predominantly feminine usage in the latter half of the twentieth century. The use of a masculine persona here will be of interest to Corelli scholars concerned with authorial identity and gender. She herself noted that her writing was not "ladylike or effeminate," implying that she had the capacity to confound gendered expectations of writing in the late nineteenth century.²⁰ Sarah Maier writes on Corelli being "en masque" in terms of gender in The Silver Domino (1893), her anonymously published satire of the publishing industry and means of airing her professional grievances.²¹ Corelli never publicly owned this book of critique in her lifetime, and her authorship was only exposed in 1930, six years after her death.²² Although Maier argues that the anonymous Domino is "gender neutral," there are several indications in the text that the authorial persona is masculine.²³ The Domino asks readers to "look me up at the Savile [gentlemen's] Club," and declares "I haven't got a wife" after stating they are not of the "fair" sex.²⁴ Maier usefully reads contemporary reviews as using the Domino's self-assured prose to identify the writer as masculine.²⁵ After her experiment as Clifford, Corelli must have considered the possibility that a pseudonym, coupled with her authoritative writing, had the capacity to create misdirection about the gender of the author.

Sarah Lubelski uses archival correspondence to challenge biographical portrayals of Corelli as merely a "demanding or unreasonable" woman and to investigate Corelli's increasing refusal to participate in the publishing industry's prescribed gender roles.²⁶ The revelation that Corelli previously wrote under a masculine name suggests that she was not only engaged with ideas of gendered professional identity at a much earlier point in her career than currently understood but also capable of manipulating that identity [End Page 114] from the very beginning of her dealings with publishers. This forces us to reevaluate her awareness and agency in her subsequent professional activities. Colleen Morrissey analyses the changing nature of Corelli's correspondence in her ten years of working with publisher George Bentley from 1883 to 1893 and identifies a "canny—and researched—sense of market realities" that seems in contrast to Corelli's portrayal of herself as an ingenue.²⁷ My findings show that Corelli's knowledge of the market was gained through experience rather than research, adding a new layer to the girlishness that Morrissey astutely analyses. Corelli used a gender stereotype to generate a sense of "chivalric obligation" in her publisher, and this proves Morrissey's inference that she "affected ignorance."²⁸

Early Corelli biographers Thomas F. G. Coates and Robert Stanley Warren Bell note that she reviewed her stepbrother George Eric Mackay's Love Letters of a Violinist (1887) under the pseudonym of "W. Stanislas Leslie" in order to guarantee a favourable review for his work, in which she had invested both her time and money.²⁹ Ransom reiterates this without verifying the information or locating the publication.³⁰ The original detail in the October 1887 issue of London Society reveals that the pseudonym used by Corelli was, in fact, Edward Stanislas Leslie.³¹ Whilst I do not claim the discovery of Corelli's use of an alias here, I do claim the correction to the forename and assert that the potential use of a masculine pen name has not been investigated, to the detriment of Corelli scholarship.³² As with the twentieth-century interpretations of Vivian, the misquoted "W." by the early biographers has been read successively with bias towards Corelli's gender.

There is much to think about here regarding the Clifford pseudonym in terms of how we have come to understand Corelli's strikingly "feminist" approach to the business of publishing.³³ Despite often being classified as an anti-feminist writer, Corelli has been presented in her professional dealings as a forthright and independent author acting on her own behalf, therefore revealing the complexity of the lives of women writers at the fin de siècle. This new information of Corelli's use of a masculine pseudonym during the 1870s further complicates this perception, as it places her within very different market conditions in terms of the patriarchal publishing establishment and reveals her to have been much younger when her work was first published than biographers have led us to believe. Reading Corelli's male pseudonym in the company of George Eliot, George Sand, and A. M. Barnard (Louisa May Alcott) makes for comparisons that have never been considered in scholarship. Alcott's androgynously pseudonymous texts, for instance, were commercially driven Gothic thrillers. Like Corelli, she used a nom de plume at the outset of her career, presumably to provide artistic separation from her main focus but perhaps also as a [End Page 115] shrewd way to assess and capitalise upon market conditions. This helps us understand why Corelli felt the need for masculine literary personae and why, in early 1874 on approaching Blackwood's Magazine, she was set on the idea of retaining the pseudonym Vivian Clifford. It was not as if she was concerned that her gender would affect her ability to be published; in her letter she is keen to stress that the nom de plume is merely cover for a successful family name. Further answers lie in Corelli's The Soul of Lilith (1892), in which her novelist character, Irene Vasillius, declares that "George Eliot and Georges [sic] Sand took men's names in order to shelter themselves a little from the pitiless storm that assails literary work known to emanate from a woman's brain."³⁴ It can be deduced from this sentiment, vocalised through one of her fictitious women writers, that Corelli used the protection of a male pseudonym to test the market. However, after seemingly avoiding the anticipated storms of critique, within a year Corelli rethought this strategy and decided to quietly retire Clifford in favour of another name, progressing to the next stage of her development as a writer.

"I would much rather have been a poet than a novelist": Minnie Mackay and Guileless Poetic Identity, 1875–77

In constructing a narrative of Corelli's early literary disappointments, Ransom relies upon a series of letters sent by Minnie Mackay to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, beginning with the aforementioned letter of January 21, 1874, and ending with her response of November 23, 1875, to a final rejection.³⁵ These letters provide greater information on Corelli's prior literary identities and output than previously considered. According to Ransom, Mackay made a first submission of a poem called "Sappho" that was rejected by Blackwood's in May 1874 after four months of waiting.³⁶ In the letters following, Mackay tries to adapt to their criticism, writing an article on "Music and Song" that is never commented on or returned to her.³⁷ Ransom paints a picture of rejection, but she underestimates Corelli's renowned capacity for perseverance and fails to entertain the possibility that the items were submitted to different publications after their rejection from Blackwood's.

"Music and Song" currently remains untraceable, but I have uncovered an epic poem entitled "A Dream of Sappho" by Minnie Mackay, which was published in the Gentleman's Magazine in July 1877. This exciting discovery complicates our current understanding of Corelli; it shows that, in using the family name of Mackay, she was content at one point in her life to be out in the world without a literary guise. Moreover, my findings show that Mackay signed her own name exclusively to poems. This would indicate that after her experiment as Vivian Clifford, despite obtaining [End Page 116] success across different forms, Mackay had gained the confidence to bare her poetic soul despite the potential for criticism. In a 1909 interview, Corelli confessed that she "would much rather have been a poet than a novelist," confirming that commerciality forced her away from her ambitions.³⁸ It can be surmised that, in ultimately leaving Minnie Mackay behind, she also relinquished the truest part of her authorial self.

Mackay's Sappho is arguably a progenitor of Zara, the idolised female character in Corelli's first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds.³⁹ The voluptuous descriptions of Zara have piqued scholars' interest in Corelli's sexuality, and the depiction of Sappho within Mackay's poem layers more intrigue upon this point:

And, raising up a white transparent hand,She plucked away the veil that draped her form,And faced me in unearthly loveliness!Upon her lofty brow a laurel wreathTwined with the tresses of her golden hair,Which fell in curling locks and twisted braidsDown o'er her bosom to her small bare feet,That peeped, like snowflakes, from beneath her robeSable in hue, and bound about her waistWith a broad circlet of flame-flashing stars.⁴⁰

Although it is beyond the scope of this article, further scholarly work is needed to explore how the early poetry—signed by Mackay or under the Vivian Clifford pseudonym—articulates both female and queer desire, particularly in terms of the gendering of speakers and the potential therein for ambiguity. This thinking places Corelli in conversation with other poets of the period who used the figure of Sappho to express desire, as Margaret Reynolds details within her work.⁴¹ Corelli's lifelong friendship and living arrangement with another woman has been much considered in biography and scholarship, with no substantial conclusions about whether the relationship was of a Sapphic nature. The discovery of Mackay's poetry, offered without a guise, provides a means to explore the queer potential of her writing with fresh eyes.⁴²

"A Dream of Sappho" appears in the Gentleman's Magazine between two submissions by Mackay's stepbrother, George Eric, in January 1877 and April 1878.⁴³ It seems that he may have provided inroads for Corelli's early career, which contrasts biographers' prejudiced assumption that he was the only one to benefit from their association.⁴⁴ Considering that George Eric Mackay's name may have assisted his stepsister with being published in the Gentleman's Magazine, it is especially intriguing that his [End Page 117] piece for Belgravia the following March is entitled "Premature Burials." Containing lurid descriptions of people being buried alive on the continent, it must have provided the inspiration for Corelli's second novel, Vendetta!, which she originally titled "Buried Alive!" This new knowledge suggests that, rather than producing novels as swiftly as she claimed, Corelli may very well have had stories in the works over longer periods of time, enabling her to keep the pace of her astounding publishing record.⁴⁵

I have found that Minnie Mackay published two companion poems, "A Dream of Roses" and "A Dream of Music," as well as a further short dramatic poem called "Love's Invitation" in Cosmopolitan in July 1875. Renamed "In Dreamland" and "To a Wanderer," they appeared as Corelli's work in the posthumous Poems (1925), part of a selection of compositions that Corelli had made prior to her death. These short poems were suited to the Cosmopolitan readership, but Mackay was simultaneously targeting a more literary audience. I have additionally uncovered "The Life Brigade," a longer poem included in Belgravia magazine's summer holiday edition of 1875, boasting an illustration by J. W. MacIntyre at the opening of the publication. A lyrical ballad of eight stanzas, the poem's rhyming quatrains and variance in metre resonate strongly with another nautically themed ballad, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Like Coleridge, Mackay uses form and metre to convey peril at sea and the relentless nature of the waves, but although two lifeboatmen die in attempting a rescue, they help save the lives of others and are hailed as heroes. In submitting work to both publications, Mackay was testing her ability to tailor her writing to a specific audience, as well as increasing her exposure within the marketplace.

Writing as Minnie Mackay, Corelli drew upon her Scottish connections. I have found "A Poets Corner at Oban," a poem describing the beauty of the Scottish Highlands, in the Lancaster Gazette of August 1876. This later appeared as "Silver Birches" in Corelli's posthumous Poems, suggesting she must have had special affection for it. Mackay was also writing for the London and Scottish Review in 1876. Charles Mackay, her adoptive father, was a member of the London and Scottish Literary Institute, and the June issue of the society's journal features him heavily.⁴⁶ In the same issue's supplement, Minnie Mackay published a poem on a society event: a garden party at Sir John and Lady Bennett's, in Mountfield, Sussex.⁴⁷ The editor alludes to "the fair authoress" regarding "her distinguished father" and suggests that she is "worthy of her lineage," which is interesting when considering her status as an adopted child.⁴⁸ Biographers have speculated whether the adoption was cover for an illegitimate birth, with Charles Mackay being her real father, but this has recently been disproved.⁴⁹ To someone carving out her own career, having her talent attributed to a [End Page 118] tenuous familial connection must have felt like an encroachment on her individuality rather than a compliment aimed at filial resemblance. A half-page advert appears in the Athenaeum of July 30, 1877, where Mackay's "A Dream of Sappho" for the Gentleman's Magazine is pitched alongside Charles Mackay's "Milton in the Porch" for Belgravia.⁵⁰ Whilst there could have been a sense of family pride generated in seeing their names side by side, I believe that there are clues here as to why Mackay ultimately created a new literary identity. The shadow of her adoptive father loomed large over her efforts, particularly in Scottish circles. Her apprenticeship showed her that, to truly own any success that may come her way, she needed to establish a literary entity separate from the Mackay family.

"I was young and struggling, and I had others to support beside myself": Cigarette and Writing for Survival in 1877

I have also uncovered that, after trying a pseudonym at the outset of her career, Mackay wrote as "Cigarette" in a short series of light, satirical columns for the Tatler weekly newspaper in late 1877.⁵¹ This was an abrupt change from the poetic persona she had inhabited just months earlier. Rather than reading this new pseudonym as a linear and planned development within Corelli's self-guided apprenticeship, I view Cigarette as a necessary commercial undertaking. We now know, contrary to biographers' depictions, that Corelli did not begin to write in 1883 in direct response to her adoptive father's near-fatal stroke, but her decision in 1877 to change the direction of her earlier writing career may very well have been influenced by Charles Mackay's poor financial circumstances and ill health following the death of his wife the previous year.⁵² "Cigarette Papers" were an exercise in providing copy and using vicarious experience as a basis for compositions: Mackay wrote vignettes on the competitive nature of tourists contributing to the Niagara Falls visitors book, the English abroad in Boulogne, and acquiring domestic help in the Monmouth Square bazaar. She was likely relying on the journalistic recollections of her adoptive father's travels in the U.S. for the first article and her stepbrother's long residency on the continent for the second.

The articles appear fortnightly, displaying the same brisk and derisory tone evident in Mackay's prose as Vivian Clifford and foreshadowing the satirical style of My Wonderful Wife. In keeping with Mackay's prior habit of presenting gender ambiguously, it is only clear on reading the third instalment of "Cigarette Papers" that the pseudonym is female, and this article, bearing in mind its basis in household management, is perhaps the only one written from Mackay's direct experience. Cigarette writes in her inaugural paper, "The vanities, vices, and shams of our daily experience [End Page 119] can all be twisted into cigarettes, to be smoked away … such metaphorical smoking is a luxury."⁵³ She sees writing as something ephemeral and of the moment. Rather than being a tribute to the daring and active female character of Cigarette in Ouida's Under Two Flags (1867), Mackay's Cigarette purports to be a flaneuse; she classifies her writing as a blend of philosophy, poetry, and satire (hinted at in the play on words of the column title, "Cigarette Papers").

It is difficult to measure the success of this mode of article writing for Mackay, especially as this iteration of the Tatler, which had only been in print for a year, was experiencing financial difficulties and became defunct in the few weeks after her third article was published.⁵⁴ The editor tasked with reviving the publication, and the likely commissioner of "Cigarette Papers," was Robert Edward Francillon, later editor of the Globe but, more importantly to the Mackay family, connected to Charles Mackay through an interest in the Jacobite movement.⁵⁵ There was a very limited time for Francillon to generate a regular readership for the Tatler. The Oban Times of December 15, 1877, states: "'Cigarette Papers'—Under this title a series of racy articles is appearing in the Tatler. 'Cigarette' is the nom de plume of Miss Minnie Mackay, daughter of Charles Mackay, both well known in Oban."⁵⁶ This tiny jotting from the regional press of the Mackay ancestral homeland in the Scottish Highlands speaks to a remote and loyal readership, and it also appears to be an act of self-promotion by Mackay, as she was probably the one to tip off the local paper and play on the name of her adoptive father. She would have seen reports in the London papers that the Tatler was failing before she was published in it, and she may have tried to gain numbers for it. Intervention was certainly not beyond Corelli, considering what we know of the Silver Domino and Edward Stanislas Leslie. Whilst "Cigarette Papers" demonstrate the author's versatility and willingness to try writing a newspaper column, I think that the use of a pseudonym here reveals her commercial instincts, which she first developed while writing as Vivian Clifford, as she separates this form of writing from her poetry and protects herself from being associated with a failing publication. And she undertook this endeavour whilst writing out of necessity, which is something that she alluded to when referring to "having others to support" early in her career.⁵⁷ Indeed, in 1904 when Corelli was interviewed by W. B. Northrop (confident that her past was well concealed at this point), she states, "I never thought of living by my pen. I was intended for a musical career, and it was only when I returned from a two years' training in a French convent that I learned it would be necessary to do something to help my dear adopted father, who was seriously ill, and unable to work as strenuously as he had done. I then tried my hand at the 'Romance of Two Worlds.'"⁵⁸ Here Corelli weaves [End Page 120] strands of a well-rehearsed narrative, and although the order and timing of these events are compressed to fit Corelli's self-styling, it contains elements of truth. What is known is that Corelli attempted a musical career in the early 1880s, beginning in December 1882 and culminating in a recital in December 1884, which Bertha Vyver recalls in her biography.⁵⁹ After her outing as Cigarette, Corelli's focus shifted away from writing, but the break allowed her to reflect upon what she had learned about the publishing industry and redouble her efforts when her father's stroke put an end to her nascent performing career. Considering how every guise Minnie Mackay had used until this point connected her in some way to her family or their literary circle, it is hardly surprising that she adopted an identity so wholly removed from the reality of her background. Indeed, as Marie Corelli, Mackay was able to begin anew and forge her own way in the literary marketplace, armed with all the knowledge she had gained over the past ten years.

"My life begins from that experience": The Formation of Marie Corelli

In her Who's Who entry of 1904, without providing any dates, Corelli declared her writing career began with the publication of three sonnets ("Romeo and Juliet," "Rosalind," and "Desdemona") in the Theatre, a monthly review edited by Clement Scott.⁶⁰ These were eventually reprinted, along with a fourth sonnet, "Troilus to Cressida," in Corelli's Poems.⁶¹ In his 1955 biography, Rev. William Stuart Scott published "Rosalind" directly from Corelli's scrapbook, noting that the clipping he transcribed came from a "long-defunct magazine" for which Corelli wrote "several poems and articles," but the original publication details for the "defunct" magazine were not available to Scott or his readers.⁶² The three sonnets are mentioned in passing in other Corelli biographies, with her narrative from interviews and the self-penned Who's Who entry shaping how these publications act as sketchy background detail to the early days of her successful novel-writing career. I have determined that "Romeo and Juliet" was published in February 1883, "Rosalind" in April 1883, and "Desdemona" in June 1883.⁶³ My research has also led to the discovery that a further, previously unknown sonnet, "Beatrice!," appears in the Theatre in February 1885, a whole year before A Romance of Two Worlds was published by Bentley and Son. Rather than celebrating another Shakespearian heroine, "Beatrice!" is written to commemorate the betrothal of the youngest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Henry, Prince of Battenburg, beginning a succession of attempts by Corelli to ingratiate herself with royalty, both at home and abroad.⁶⁴

Furthermore, I have found that "Desdemona" and "Troilus to Cressida" appeared in the Theatre under the name of Rose Trevor three years [End Page 121] earlier, in June and September 1880, respectively. Ransom quotes from a 1924 press article written in the days after Corelli's death identifying the young Minnie Mackay as a trained singer who used Trevor as a "professional name."⁶⁵ Ransom makes the connection with a character of the same name in Charles Mackay's epic poem A Man's Heart (1860), noting a touching link between the poet and his adopted daughter, but does not pursue Trevor through the archives.⁶⁶ The earlier appearance of these sonnets reflects the pragmatism that Corelli demonstrated later in her career in reusing material, but they also show that, whilst trying for musical success, she was a poet at heart.⁶⁷ These compositions were of such importance to her that she resubmitted them, as Marie Corelli, when she committed herself entirely to writing and later intended both for a book of her collected poems.

Within the Theatre I have additionally found two vignettes authored by Corelli, "A Fair Enthusiast" (March 1883) and "His Big Friend" (August 1884), as well as an article titled "Joachim and Sarasate" (May 1883), all of which are new additions to the Corelli canon, as they were not subsequently published elsewhere. They confirm that, before she produced her novels, the authorial persona of Marie Corelli was far more than a writer of sonnets. These articles address musicianship and music appreciation with a healthy dose of Corelli's opinionated style (reminiscent of her writing as both Clifford and Cigarette). They also speak to her aesthetic principles and her Romantic conception of genius. Kuehn writes of how Corelli appropriates the Romantic notions of imagination, inspiration, and aura, seeing the author as developing her own discourse on aesthetic principles.⁶⁸ In these articles, Corelli laments improper attention to Wagner, the genius of the violinist Sarasate, and the untrained ear not recognising the beauty of the cello. A comparison between these early critiques and Corelli's 1895 admonishment of John Everett Millais for the commercial use of his painting "Bubbles" proves her to be remarkably consistent in her ideas about creativity and artistic value throughout her career.⁶⁹ In these later-suppressed writings as Corelli, she concurrently publishes in different genres, something she had not attempted since the days of Vivian Clifford.

I have found that Corelli's debut as a fiction writer occurred earlier than previously thought, although the short story in question will be familiar to Corelli scholars as it appeared with an altered title in her 1896 collection Cameos. "Baby Tramps" was written for Sylvia's Home Journal and was published in April 1883, later becoming "Tiny Tramps."⁷⁰ Interestingly, Corelli names herself here as Contessa Corelli; she had used this title in a letter when trying to ingratiate herself with Ouida just three months earlier.⁷¹ It is intriguing to consider that, twenty years later, Corelli preferred in Who's Who to own the poems she wrote for the Theatre as her first publication success, rather than a short story which would have better [End Page 122] indicated her early literary potential. I believe that, whilst Corelli enjoyed thinking of herself as a poet at heart, the concealment of the publication of both "Baby Tramps" and her nonfiction for the Theatre was an attempt to deflect potential scrutiny away from her early writing career (as well as her mendacious use of an aristocratic title). Corelli calculated that three poems did not have as much power as a short story to attract journalistic attention to the possibility of her having produced more early work. Clement Scott always referred to Corelli as his "literary Godchild," and the revelation of her numerous publications under his editorship at the Theatre now makes this an understandable assertion.⁷² By 1912, Corelli had revised her Who's Who entry, entirely removing any reference to her poems and naming A Romance of Two Worlds as her "first literary success."⁷³ In an interview she asserted, "My life begins from that experience," and in shifting forward the emergence of Marie Corelli, she was done with constructing the narrative of her own rise to fame.⁷⁴

My final discovery of a Corelli periodical publication is the poem "Vale Amor," printed in Belgravia in October 1885. It is erroneously listed as "Gale Amor" in the ProQuest digital archive due to the poor transcription of the Caxtonian font used for content headings in the magazine. Hidden in plain sight, and available via a simple database search, the text has not previously been recorded in scholarship. This publication is especially interesting because it evidences what appears to be Corelli's strategy for success: working her way up through increasingly well-known periodicals to gain literary attention and ultimately win recognition and a publisher for her first novel.⁷⁵ Using this method, Minnie Mackay had progressed from a publication like the London and Scottish Review to Belgravia, and with "Vale Amor," Belgravia was once again her target periodical. The poem is a page long and composed of twenty-seven heroic couplets. The phrase "Vale Amor" translates from Spanish into "Goodbye, Love," which encapsulates the sentiment of the poem. Towards its close, the speaker declares that "the past is past forever," a rather pertinent sentiment when considering how Corelli went on to treat her early work.⁷⁶

"Why … should the veil be lifted merely to satisfy a vulgar and idle curiosity?": Corelli and the Protection of Authorial Identity

After 1882, Corelli's obfuscation of her prior pseudonyms and the concealment of her early periodical publication history ensured that the work of Vivian Clifford, Minnie Mackay, Cigarette, and Rose Trevor remained hidden behind a veil of secrecy for nearly 150 years.⁷⁷ They were not Marie Corelli's successes, so they were never spoken of. Corelli effectively traded up: from testing the water under a male pseudonym, to composing poetry [End Page 123] under her real name, to using a satirical pseudonym to hide a commercial endeavour, to trying a stage name, to finally deciding on a Franco-Italian identity as her permanent persona separate from the Mackay family. There are no overlaps between these professional identities, which demonstrates strategic thinking but also reveals that Corelli was taking on each identity in turn and learning from her experiences in the literary marketplace. Once she became Marie Corelli, she put all she had learned from her self-guided training into use. In her preface to The Life Everlasting (1911), Corelli explains that she deliberately wrote commercial novels, such as Vendetta!, to support her as she pursued her project of a septology of novels based around her own version of the Christian faith.⁷⁸ Corelli had worked out, via her prior pseudonyms, how to operate within the publishing market, win success, and thereby pursue what truly interested her.

In her monograph on Corelli, Annette Federico tests the literary persona of Corelli against Richard Ellman's theory of the "split self."⁷⁹ Ellman argues that a bifurcation of personality occurs in late nineteenth-century authors and that the pseudonym "symbolized the duality which resulted from a disassociation of personality."⁸⁰ Federico suggests that, although Corelli's "manoeuvre is typical of the ethos of the decade, the authenticity of the self she self-created makes her an exceptional case of authorial anthropomorphising."⁸¹ Whilst I support Federico's view that Corelli asserted her "subjective version of reality" onto the world around her, it is interesting to consider how the splits in self that she enacts via her use of pseudonym before becoming Marie Corelli actually make a far more convincing case for her gradually morphing into her final identity, with the beginnings of this behaviour deeply rooted in her early childhood and status as an adopted child.⁸² The apprenticeship that Corelli conducted, and her use of each pseudonym, enabled both her literary and self-development.

By the time that E. F. Benson met Corelli in the early twentieth century, "she lived, furiously and excitedly, in a bellicose romance of her own making, which she was persuaded was real."⁸³ For Benson, despite the artifice and her romantic literary lifestyle, Corelli was not merely inhabiting the persona of her own imaginings. She was Marie Corelli in totality, and he was "sure that there never was a woman so primitively genuine" in her convictions, passions, and self-belief.⁸⁴ The progression through her literary and performing identities can, therefore, be viewed as stages in development and increasing independence away from her family connections, towards her not only inhabiting but being Marie Corelli. [End Page 124]

"I hope you don't altogether hate me": The Legacy of Marie Corelli's Obfuscation

Rather than depicting Corelli as a fin de siècle novel-publishing phenomenon or a writer who was simply in the right place at the right time to fluke her popular success of the 1890s, my research reveals that Corelli worked at her craft for over a decade earlier than previously thought, managing her own apprenticeship and trialling different modes of writing and literary guises. Her pseudonyms add layers of intrigue to Corelli's character, with the discovery of her masculine personae and her strong poetic identity as Mackay making for exciting further study. However, perhaps the richest ground for Corelli scholars amongst my findings is the wealth of new comment pieces and satire that help to shed new light on her abilities as a writer.

And yet my discoveries also pose problems for how we view Corelli's legacy. Her suppression of the toil and limited accomplishments of her decade-in-training created a false narrative of almost overnight success and therefore had the potential to act as a deterrent to jobbing writers hoping for a break. The perpetuation of this myth may have sat uncomfortably with her; she told the Pall Mall Magazine that she hoped she was not hated for her success and that she was aware of "the poor strugglers, who do good work, who engage in laborious, scholarly research but do not have a public large enough to assure them a competence."⁸⁵ In the same article, she comments, "A man thinks literature is outside woman's sphere. What is woman's sphere? To get married I suppose! But we are forgetting there are not enough men to go round."⁸⁶ The suggestion of a career in literature as a viable means of self-support for women could be read as protofeminist, but in her concealment of how she earned her own success, Corelli can also be seen as anti-feminist. Rather than model how women could achieve financial independence and success incrementally by contributing to periodicals in various literary forms and conducting their own apprenticeships, Corelli chose to project herself as gifted and worthy of instant fame, with the implied suggestion that strugglers were doomed to poverty. Through obfuscation, she pulled the ladder up behind her. In doing so, Corelli persuaded biographers and scholars for over a century that they did not need to research her working life prior to 1883. [End Page 125]