The biography of a turn-of-the-20th-century author whose now forgotten mystical and romantic novels were bestsellers in England and around the world until WWII. According to Ransom (Fanny Trollope, not reviewed), the world-famous Marie Corelli may not have been Corelli at all, but Mary Mills or perhaps Minnie Mackay, the adopted or illegitimate daughter of journalist Charles Mackay, himself a well-known figure in 19th-century England. Then again, she may have been his granddaughter. Or left on his doorstep “one snowy winter’s night.” Whatever her true lineage, she set out to be “somebody” and succeeded. Her 31 novels and assorted articles, booklets, and speeches were almost always blasted by critics and embraced by readers and audiences. The extraordinarily healthy sales of her books should also be judged against her contemporaries: H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde. Her fans included Queen Victoria, who requested that all of Corelli’s books be sent to her, and her friend the Prince of Wales. Her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, was accepted for publication in 1885 when she was 30 years old. It concerned a heroine who was sent via “Physical Electricity” to visit other planets. Subsequent novels also dealt with mystical and spiritual experiences, but many deplored mankind’s weaknesses (absinthe addiction in Wormwood) or celebrated womankind’s strengths, although she was an ambivalent feminist (against the vote but for independence). She was prescient about atomic power, germ warfare, sex education in schools, and historic preservation. Settled in Stratford-on-Avon with her lifelong friend Bertha van der Vyver, she antagonized the town fathers with her fight to preserve Shakespeare-era cottages and continued to scuffle with them through WWI. Corelli died in 1924, but her books had a brief New Age revival in the 1960s. The author has struggled to piece together fragmented historical material, for which Victorian scholars will be grateful. (12 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-7509-1570-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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