Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/24

 was impossible, she was treated as a pretending upstart: the critics would have none of her.

But her success with her first book, "A Romance of Two Worlds," was due to itself, and not to either the praise or the censure of the press. Only four reviews of this romance appeared, each about ten lines long, and none of the four would have helped to sell a single copy. But the public got hold of it. People began to talk about it and discuss it. Then it was judged worth attacking, and the more continuous its sale the more it was jeered at by the critical fault-finders.

Marie Corelli did not invite adverse criticism. She was quite a girl, untried and inexperienced, and had, apparently, from her letters to her friends, a most touching faith in the chivalry of the press. "I hope," she wrote to Mr. Bentley, "the clever men on the Press will be kind to me, as it is a first book [the 'Romance']; because if they are I shall be able to do so much better another time."

But, much to her surprise, the clever men of the press bullied her as though she had been a practiced hand at literature, and abused her with quite unnecessary violence. She did not retort upon them, however. "Vendetta," "Thelma," "Ardath," and other works were produced patiently in rotation, and still the abuse continued—and so did her suc