Marie Corelli

Marie Corelli was the pen name of Mary Mackay, an English novelist who became one of the best-selling authors of the late Victorian era. Concealing an illegitimate birth, she circulated several romantic stories about her ancestry over her lifetime. Her 1886 debut, A Romance of Two Worlds, introduced the blend of spiritualism, Christian mysticism, and speculative science that defined her career, including interstellar travel powered by a kind of personal electricity. She followed it with The Sorrows of Satan (1895), often cited as one of the earliest true bestsellers, and later works such as Ziska, The Soul of Lilith, and The Secret Power, which imagined airships, atomic weapons, and a lost civilization. Enormously popular with readers despite persistent mockery from critics, she settled in Stratford-upon-Avon in her later years, campaigning to preserve its historic buildings, though her fame faded sharply after a wartime scandal.