Today we mark the life of the English novelist MARIE CORELLI.  No precise date is available because she was adopted in infancy by the poet Charles MacKay. Corelli was the Jacqueline Susann of the Victorian era. She was a master at tickling the Victorian libido while remaining primly moral. Instead of multiple orgasms there was a great deal of nostril-flaring in her books. The Prince of Wales, who preferred flaring his own nostrils to reading about it, was one of her great fans as was the Queen V herself, who literary taste ran to the more common.

She became enormously rich, and helping her to spend her great literary fortune was her life-long lover, Bertha Vyver, whom Corelli called “Mamasita” and “Darling Ber.” Big Ber called Corelli “Little Girl.” All but one of her biographers agree that besides hugging each other a lot and combing one another’s hair, which was about the limit of permissible behavior in Victorian “romantic friendships” they most certainly flared nostrils together, which was not.

The story is told that while in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde was bothered by a prison guard who considered himself a literary connoisseur. One day he asked Wilde if he considered Marie Corelli a “great writer.” Said Wilde, “Now don’t think I have anything against her moral character, but from the way she writes, she ought to be here.”