Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/138

 *dominate. Indeed, the majority of the novelist's correspondents are men. Marie Corelli is intensely in earnest, imaginative, and passionate. She lets her reader know, before she has covered many pages, precisely what her book is to be about, and in this way she spares one the irritation excited by those old-fashioned writers who used to drone on for chapter after chapter, making headway in an exasperatingly slow and cumbrous fashion.

Then it must be taken into consideration that there is a very big public which has practically nothing to do except eat meals, sleep, take exercise, and read novels. Such people are necessarily more introspective than busy folk, and many of them are exceedingly anxious as to what will become of them when it shall please Providence to put an end to their aimless existence in this vale of smiles and tears. Marie Corelli supplies them with ample food for thought and argument.

Perhaps all these attempts to solve the Unsolvable have a morbid tendency; a little simple faith is certainly more salutary. However that may be, a very great public regards such attempts as more engrossing reading-matter than tales "of love and politics and society"; and a still stronger reason for Marie Corelli's immense popularity is to be found in the fact that she is the only female Richmond in