Marie Corelli

Marie Corelli (1855–1924), born Mary Mackay, was an English novelist and the bestselling author of the late Victorian and Edwardian years. The illegitimate daughter of the Scottish songwriter Charles Mackay, she trained as a pianist before publishing A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), a tale of spiritual electricity that found a huge audience. Thelma (1887), Barabbas, The Sorrows of Satan, which outsold any previous English novel, and The Master-Christian followed. Critics mocked her, Queen Victoria and Gladstone read her, and she defended herself in print at length. From 1899 she lived at Stratford-upon-Avon, where she campaigned to preserve the town's old buildings.