Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan

Corelli's Victorian Sensation Novel and the Literary Marketplace

Mar 8, 2009

Although sensational elements of Corelli's text, such as sex and money, were key plot points, Corelli's depiction of the London literary scene is just as provocative.

Upon hearing of the plot details of Marie Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan, the modern literature student immediately thinks of Corelli’s debt to Germany’s Faust legend or to Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Corelli’s interpretation of the devil and London’s contemporary literary scene is echoed in modern films such as The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which an unsuccessful, impoverished author meets the devil (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt), who tempts him with fame and fortune in return for Webster’s soul.

The Victorian Woman Reader and the Sensation Novel

According to Kate Flint’s The Women Reader, Victorian audiences were concerned with the effect that sensational novels could have on young female readers, and Corelli certainly plays with that concern, especially with the character of Lady Sibyl. As Lady Sibyl narrates the history of her corruption in her suicide letter, the “fashionable fiction of the day” played a large part in her downfall. Upon initially reading one of the popular scandalous novels, Lady Sibyl recounts how she was so filled with a “genuine disgust that I flung it on the ground in a fit of loathing and contempt (392).

Since modern critics praised the novel, however, Lady Sibyl reconsidered her initial reaction, and “little by little the insidious abominations of it filtered into my mind and stayed there” (393). According to Lady Sibyl, the poetry of Swinburne, combined with the “prurient romance,” thus served to poison her mind and to literally kill her soul (ibid.). In fact, when Lucio chooses to illustrate his tableau “Seeds of Corruption,” he chooses to show a teenage girl reading a novel of the “sexual type” (270), further emphasizing the destructive nature of certain types of literature. Not all popular fiction, however, is depicted by Corelli in such a negative light, as we shall see with the character of Mavis Clare.

The Victorian Woman Writer in Corelli's Sorrows of Satan

As a representative Victorian woman writer, Mavis Clare serves as an interesting contrast to the corrupted lifestyle represented in Lady Sibyl. As Lady Sibyl remarks to her new husband, “when I want to feel like an angel, I read Mavis Clare” (299). Mavis, interestingly enough, is enamored of the Romantic poets, especially Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and we can assume it is the Romantic influence that impacts the themes of her novels.

To further distinguish her from her contemporaries, Mavis refuses to take the literary critics and journals seriously, a trait that Tempest and Lady Sibyl lack and which contributes to their downfalls.

Marie Corelli and the Victorian Literary Marketplace

Corelli devotes much of her novel to an incisive critique of the Victorian literary market, especially as it pertains to reviewers and publishers, and it is through Mavis’s character that we are to see a literary ideal that does not cater to either the public or the literary reviewers and is thus resistant to the evil lure posed by Lucio.

Correlli, Marie. The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire. New York: Adamant Media Corporation, 2006.

Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader, 1837-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

The copyright of the article Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan in 18th & 19th Century British Fiction is owned by Sara Dustin. Permission to republish Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.