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Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds: A Novel (1886)
Apparently Marie Corelli outsold the work of combined works of contemporaries including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and HG Wells. And yet I’ve only heard her name vaguely.
Her *Romance of Two Worlds* combines grandly over the top nineteenth-century romance with didactic Christianity and an obsession with electricity. The narrator meets a charismatic healer and preacher of the doctine of ELECTRICITY (caps in the original). She becomes his ardent follower - and there follow many descriptions of how great electric lights are and how some people are naturally in tune because they have compatible electrical fields.
Also, dialogue like this:
( Read more... )
As a side-note, it turns out that Corelli lived her whole life with Bertha Vyver, leaving her everything when she died. She didn’t identify as a lesbian, but now I note that this book was full of lengthy, detailed descriptions of the beauty of the preacher’s noble sister.
Apparently Marie Corelli outsold the work of combined works of contemporaries including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and HG Wells. And yet I’ve only heard her name vaguely.
Her *Romance of Two Worlds* combines grandly over the top nineteenth-century romance with didactic Christianity and an obsession with electricity. The narrator meets a charismatic healer and preacher of the doctine of ELECTRICITY (caps in the original). She becomes his ardent follower - and there follow many descriptions of how great electric lights are and how some people are naturally in tune because they have compatible electrical fields.
Also, dialogue like this:
( Read more... )
As a side-note, it turns out that Corelli lived her whole life with Bertha Vyver, leaving her everything when she died. She didn’t identify as a lesbian, but now I note that this book was full of lengthy, detailed descriptions of the beauty of the preacher’s noble sister.
