Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini

  • Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 by Philip Waller
    Oxford, 1181 pp, £85.00, April 2006, ISBN 0 19 820677 1

In the early 20th century, literary pilgrims to Stratford-upon-Avon already knew a lot about the great writer they had come to honour. The author’s house in Church St has rather come down in the world since then and is now an outpost of Birmingham University, but in its heyday it was home to a writer with some claims to be the most widely read, in English and in translation, across the world. Visitors already knew so much because Marie Corelli not only boasted the longest entry in Who’s Who, but had enjoyed commercial success and international celebrity on a scale unprecedented in literary history.

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