‘The Power of Her Pen’: Marie Corelli, Authorial Identity and Literary Value

Abstract

When bestselling novelist Marie Corelli (1855–1924) launched her career in the 1880s, substantial changes to the literary field were under way: new inexpensive book formats challenged the dominance of the three-volume novel; periodical and newspaper publication was increasing; the reading public was expanding; and the advent of a royalty system and possibilities for syndication changed the way writers understood literary production and their own literary careers. These and other transformations to the production, distribution and reception of print had a significant impact on notions of authorial identity and literary value. In particular, they contributed to the marking out of a divide between the ‘popular’ and the ‘profound’ that had not been as notable earlier in the century when, as Nigel Cross notes, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson and George Eliot, for example, achieved both critical and popular success (1985, p. 216). The explosion of print culture and the advent of mass readership, however, changed everything. For some, these transformations represented a boon; for others, a threat. There were more opportunities than ever before to take up authorship as a profession, but this created anxieties about what constituted literary value and who was qualified to judge. Pierre Bourdieu has defined this form of discrimination as ‘the power to consecrate’ in his articulation of the modern literary field as a ‘site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and…to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer’ (1993, p. 42).