By the turn of the century Marie Corelli was the most popular woman novelist in the entire world at a time when most people were reacting against anything Victorian. Her first novel was published in 1886 (A Romance of Two Worlds) when high Victorian morality was being displaced by the high decadence of the “Yellow Nineties.” Corelli reacted against rising hedonism and secularism with its displacement of faith in science instead of in religion. Her books touted Victorian values, sentimentality and spirituality. They were replete with “the pieties of both Puritan and Evangelical in America and England. She always rewarded virtue and punished vice” (Kowalczyk 850), just as did most of the earlier Victorian writers. Additionally, as Nickianne Moody tells it, Corelli “challenge[d] science by appropriating its discourse and positing spiritualism. The presence of the spiritual use[d] evidence of the past to reveal the social bankruptcy of the present” (“Lawyers” 185).

In that her novels were highly moralistic and didactic, the question follows: Why did they break every sales record? George Bullock, one of her early biographers, proffered his theory about her success:

Romance, rife with the supernatural, “was a runaway bestseller, and was devoured by all classes of reader” (Sutherland, “Marie” 204). Corelli told her publisher, Richard Bentley, that the reason it was so successful was because it “touched a chord somewhere in the great nerves of humanity.”

One chord had to do with how people coped, or failed to cope, with death. The Victorians had an “evangelical notion and desire for a ‘good death’ ” (Moody, “Moral” 189).