Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (42 page)

Grand began writing the stridently polemical novel
Ideala: A Study from Life
in 1880, although the work was not published until eight years later, at her own expense. The small profits from this first novel allowed her to leave her husband, whom she evidently loathed, in 1890, and decamp with her young son to London, where she supported herself by writing. The author had by now changed her name to ‘Sarah Grand’ so that she could write more freely than she could as ‘McFall’. The marital owner of that name, none the less, must have writhed if he ever read her fiction.

Her reputation was made by the scandalous
The Heavenly Twins
(1893). One publisher who was shown the manuscript turned it down because of the syphilis theme (the unlucky heroine, thanks to a venereally rotten husband, delivers a baby which resembles ‘a speckled toad’). Another publisher, under the advice of George Meredith, turned it down as ‘too clogged with ideas’. Ironic, since Meredith himself wrote novels famously clogged with verbiage. When it was eventually published, under the imprint of the
Guardian
newspaper office, very unusually,
The Heavenly Twins
sold 20,000 copies and was reprinted six times in its first year. It made its author close on £20,000. Meredith should have been so lucky.

Four of Grand’s polemical ‘New Woman’ novels:
Ideala
(1888),
A Domestic Experiment
(1891),
The Heavenly Twins
(1893) and
The Beth Book
(1897) are influential feminist works to this day. She is credited with inventing the term ‘New Woman’. Opponents like Mrs Lynn Linton called them ‘the shrieking sisterhood’ but Grand’s heroines do not merely shriek. They find employment, flee the shackles of marriage,
believe in ‘rational’ dress (no crinolines, bustles or corsets), commit guiltless adultery, or live defiantly, in sin, or with lesbian partners. In a fighting preface to
Ideala
, Grand defended her combativeness with the assertion: ‘Doctors spiritual must face the horrors of the dissecting room.’ She believed that men – not women – with VD should be imprisoned and injected with arsenic, the sovereign pre-antibiotic treatment. Open discussion about venereal infection, and the protection of women from it, was her lifelong campaign.

Grand in fact lived a very long life but wrote (or chose to publish) relatively little, although she lectured widely on progressive topics dear to her. After her husband’s death in 1898, she lived in Tunbridge Wells where she was President of the local branch of the Suffragette Societies. In 1920 she moved to Bath, where she lived with a woman friend, and was subsequently mayoress of the city on six occasions. Born during the Crimean War, she lived long enough to have her house destroyed by a German bomb, during the Blitz. In
Who’s Who
, Grand slyly entered her principal recreation as ‘sociology’. ‘Venereology’ would, presumably, not have been printable.

I never married because I have three pets at home that answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.
Corelli’s spinster credo

Corelli’s is the most spectacular of posthumous nose-dives. Until her death in 1924, she held her place as Britain’s best known and most notorious bestselling novelist. Works like
Barabbas
(1893) – with its feisty heroine Judith Iscariot (does the stupid woman think ‘Iscariot’ is a surname, like ‘Fotheringay’? asked reviewers) – clocked up cumulative sales of over a quarter of a million at unprecedented speed. Hot cakes didn’t come into it. At her zenith in the late 1890s, publishers were elbowing each other out of the way to offer Corelli advances of £10,000 per book. Sixteen years after her death, her annual royalty cheques amounted to £28.

Marie Corelli’s fiction extends to her name (‘Madonna of the little heart’) and the pedigree behind it. She was born plain Mary Mills, in Bayswater, London, the
bastard daughter of Charles Mackay, third-rate novelist and second-rate journalist. Her mother was a servant girl, Mary Ellen Mills. Unrated. Six years after Mary’s birth, Mackay made an honest woman of her mother. ‘Minnie Mackay’, as she was now called (although still by law illegitimate), was ill educated but fearsomely bright. In 1876, her mother died and Bertha Vyver, a childhood friend, joined the Mackay household. Initially a companion, she became Mary’s closest friend, and probably her lover. With Vyver’s help (she was the daughter of a countess) Minnie devised more exciting names than those her background had bequeathed her – with a view to a career in music. Programmes listed ‘Rose Trevor’ and the more exotic ‘Marie di Corelli’. It was a metamorphosis: from below-stairs bastard to concert-hall butterfly.

Music, alas, proved too hard, and in the mid-1880s, she turned to fiction. In 1886, George Bentley, against the advice of his reader, Hall Caine (who, even at this early stage, may have sniffed a dangerous rival), published
A Romance of Two Worlds
. Marie was thirty-one, and resolutely claimed to be seventeen: no beauty, she hated being photographed, insisting that the public should have an idealised picture of her. The camera was altogether too unidealistic a device. Her first novel was inspired, Corelli mysteriously claimed, by a ‘peculiar psychic occurrence’ and was designed to expound ‘the gospel of electricity’. That too was somewhat mysterious. Christianity, evidently, had lost its voltage.
A Romance of Two Worlds
, like everything Marie went on to write, was a runaway bestseller, and was devoured by all classes of reader. By mid-career she had even recruited Queen Victoria as a fan. For Gladstone, she was a writer in the Martin Tupper class, if less godly – Christian godly – than his particular favourite, Mrs Humphry Ward. The Prince of Wales was an admirer of the spiffing little authoress and Marie returned the compliment by introducing ‘HRH’ into her fiction more frequently than was strictly tasteful.

Professionally, the move from George Bentley to Methuen with
Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy
in 1893 was momentous. It was the bestselling of all her bestsellers. Together with Hall Caine’s
The Manxman
and Mrs Humphry Ward’s
Marcella
, Methuen’s 6s single-volume Corelli titles did for the venerable three-decker, opening a new era in the history of British fiction, in which buyer not borrower was king and Miss Corelli his queen.

Posterity has had great fun with Corelli’s absurdities: the ‘corrected photographs’; the gondola complete with Venetian gondolier in which she would glide down the Avon to the amazement of her fellow Stratfordians; the platform in her living room at Mason Croft – Shakespeare’s house, of course – on which (four-foot-nothing in her silk stockings) she would perch to receive visitors. The liver, almost fatally
bisected by the corsets needed to preserve a wasp-waist in middle age. The conviction for food hoarding (i.e. sugar to make jam) during the First World War – the prosecution brought by neighbours who hated her and that damned gondola.

But Marie, too, was a good hater. Whether like her creation, Mavis Clare, she trained her dogs to raven the invariably slashing notices of her novels is not clear. After
The Sorrows of Satan
(1895), her books carried an instruction on their fly-leaves that no review copies would be sent out. If the hacks wanted her novels, the swine could buy them full-price from the bookshop like everyone else. The reviewers kept slashing and the novels kept selling by the hundred thousand. She loathed the ‘New Woman’ (‘tomboy tennis-players and giantesses’) and nurtured messianic delusions, buoyed up by her phenomenal success. In
The Master Christian
(1900), availing herself of the millenarian moment, Corelli addressed all the churches of the world ‘in the name of Christ’ and instructed them on how to put their holy houses in order. Alas, the £28 royalty cheque and oblivion were just over the horizon.

She is made of the heroic stuff that knows not what defeat means. Women’s Penny Paper
on Lady Dixie

Florence Douglas was born in Cummertrees, Dumfriesshire, the youngest daughter of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry. The family history was tragic and incorrigibly dissolute: her father committed suicide (by shotgun) as did her twin brother (by knife) in 1891. Her eldest brother was the brute who accused Oscar Wilde of being a ‘somdomite’ [sic], provoking the trials that, with the treachery of her nephew ‘Bosie’, destroyed the writer. Florence’s upbringing was disrupted at the age of nine when her widowed mother abruptly converted to Catholicism, imposing the faith on her young children and taking them off to Paris. It was an unhappy episode. Meeting her on the Continent, Bulwer-Lytton wrote a poem for the sad young girl, ‘Little Florrie Douglas’. Precocious Florrie could write her own verse, thank you very much, Lord Lytton, and published a volume of childhood effusions, under the pseudonym ‘Darling’. She went on to publish a bloody dramatic tragedy,
Abel Avenged
, at the age of twenty.

In 1875, aged nineteen, she married Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, nicknamed ‘Beau’ for his good looks. An inveterate gambler and a heavy drinker, he was in severe financial distress within the decade. There were two sons, George Douglas and Albert Edward Wolston, godson of the Prince of Wales. As Lady Dixie, Florence, with her husband, three brothers and a friend, explored ‘the unknown wastes of Patagonia’ from 1878 to 1879. There she shot, and ate, wild animals and composed a travel book,
Across Patagonia
(1881). She was war correspondent for the
Morning Post
during the Boer conflict of 1880–81, and the only female. Among other causes she agitated for the rights of African Zulus and English women. She believed in, and designed, rational dress, hated the sexually restricting side-saddle, and was an early advocate for women’s soccer, becoming President of the British Ladies’ Football Club. It is not recorded what her position was – probably striker.

In 1883, Dixie became the focus of sensational news coverage when it was alleged that at Windsor, where she and her husband were living, she had been the target of a dastardly Fenian murder attempt. Doubts as to the veracity of the incident were raised, questions were asked in the House, and Queen Victoria dispatched John Brown to look into the matter. Her faithful Highlander caught a chill while investigating and died. Dixie sent a wreath of African immortelles to his funeral, and insisted her kidnap tale was true. The Queen graciously responded with a Landseer print. The actual facts of the case were never ascertained.

Dixie’s first published novel was
Redeemed in Blood
(1889). An absurd melodrama of high life, centred on the marital trials of Lord and Lady Wrathness, the novel has some vivid Patagonian scenes. Dixie’s other fiction includes
Aniwee, or, the Warrior Queen
(1890), a tale of the Patagonian Araucanian Indians. Her best-known work is
Gloriana, or, the Revolution of 1900
(1890). In this bizarre fable, Gloria of Ravensdale disguises herself as a boy, Hector D’Estrange (based on Oscar Wilde), attends Eton and Oxford, and eventually gets her/himself into Parliament. The narrative ends with a visionary panorama of a regenerated London as seen from a balloon in 1999.

In 1902, Dixie published a drama in verse on the persecution of women entitled
Isola, or the Disinherited
. Although she was a good shot, a horsewoman and a strong swimmer, she loathed blood sports in later life (whether it extended to boxing, as regularised by her brother’s Marquess of Queensberry’s rules is not clear). She published a tract on the subject,
The Horrors of Sport
(1891), but she did not mention the big game hunting which had been one of her early passions. Not a lover of the male sex, apparently, she claimed that ‘horses and dogs were her best friends’. Her fiction is unremembered, but in the wastes of Patagonia the three-star Hotel Lady
Florence Dixie hospitably keeps her name alive, as do various encyclopaedias of soccer.

Ralph Iron.

Schreiner was born in Wittebergen, Basutoland, the sixth of ten surviving children of a Methodist missionary of German origin. Her father, Gottlob Schreiner, had come to the Cape in 1837 under the auspices of the London Missionary Society. Her mother, Rebecca (née Lyndall) was English and of respectable working-class background. She was brought up, as one her biographers puts it, ‘in a context of parental, certainly maternal, severity and the brooding presence of a wrathful God’. A precocious girl who wanted above all else ‘to be clever, to be wise’, Schreiner educated herself and later claimed to have become a free-thinker at the age of twelve, after her little sister Ellie died and God did nothing about it. Her childhood was unhappy, unhealthy (she suffered from lifelong asthma) and unsettled. Gottlob was forced to move to another part of the country in 1869, following accusations of financial impropriety. In 1872 a broken engagement (and perhaps seduction) wounded Schreiner emotionally and coincided with more attacks of her chronic illness.