"a woman of deplorable talent who imagined that she was a genius, and was accepted as a genius by a public to whose commonplace sentimentalities and prejudices she gave a glamorous setting." - Grant Allen
"the imagination of a Poe with the style of an Ouida and the mentality of a nursemaid." -James Agate
"I hate God!" Said Angel.
And having made this un-angel-like statement, she folded her short arms across her breast and surveyed her horrified audience defiantly.
So begins a tale of a poor child's expulsion from Sunday school for the cruelties of a God who would allow her parents to die, and her life to be one of unending misery. A deceptively short work, Angel's Wickedness contrasts the God of Vengeance with the God of Love. It is either a statement of absolute faith in the greater plan, or a Miltonian subversion of it. Angel's story is the perfect entry to the surprisingly complex work of the writer who dominated the Victorian era and early 20th century, .
Corelli lived in the spaces between. Even her birth is still shrouded in mystery, and was the grandest Romance and Christian writer of her era. She outsold Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling put together. Critics hated her, calling her "the favourite of the common multitude", and she hated them in return. A favourite of Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria and William Gladstone. She was also a lesbian, with a her 'companion' of 40 years to whom she left her entire estate and is buried alongside her in a couples grave. Her friends included Mark Twain, Ouida, the Empress Frederick of Germany, and Alfred Tennyson, while her writing tried to reconcile Christianity with reincarnation and astral projection.