In the late‑Victorian era, one novelist outsold Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells combined. Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill and William Gladstone were her devoted fans. The critics, however, loathed her – calling her “the favourite of the common multitude” and refusing to review her books. Her name was Marie Corelli, and this is her story.

The Writer and the Woman is the 1903 biography examined the most popular English novelist of her age while she was still alive. The authors had access to Corelli’s private letters and papers, and they present her as a fearless crusader for Christian morality, a woman of “brilliant fearlessness” who “sweeps aside petty argument in its giant’s stride towards the goal for which she aims”.

This abridged edition selects five revealing chapters.

Chapter I introduces the “Heroine of the Story” through the encouraging letters of her publisher, George Bentley.

Chapter II revisits her childhood and the adoption that disguised her true parentage. Chapter VII celebrates Bentley’s paternal guidance as Corelli’s early career stumbled toward triumph.

Chapter XVII offers personal glimpses – her campaign for Shakespeare’s burial place, her refusal to review a rival’s book, and her poems defending herself against the press.

Chapter XVIII finds Corelli settled in Stratford‑upon‑Avon, dreaming of turning the town into a “Bayreuth of Literature”.

The edition is completed by a narrated guide to Corelli’s books voiced by Charles Featherstone.

If you have never heard of Marie Corelli, you are about to discover the strangest, most improbable literary phenomenon of the Victorian age.