Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/364

 Now, as to Marie Corelli's "public." The great sale of her works proves it to be a vast one, and the fact that her publishers have not found it advisable to issue her in sixpenny form is clear proof that she commands the purses of those who are able to afford six shillings. And although the possession of money is no guarantee of literary taste, yet it stands to reason that the upper and middle classes, taken in the mass, are the chief supporters of literature, and afford the best criterion of worth in their selection of books owing to the fact that their education is superior to that of people who are commonly designated as "poor." But for the latter there are the free libraries, and the Corelli novels are in as constant demand wherever books are to be obtained for nothing, as at railway bookstalls, where there is not a halfpenny abatement of the full published price. Miss Corelli, then, being read by people of all classes, may certainly be said to have won over a considerable majority of the bookreading portion of the British race.

And it must not be forgotten that she is perhaps the most extensively read of living novelists in Holland, Russia, Germany and Austria, where translations of her books are always to be obtained, or that her "Barabbas" and "A Romance of Two Worlds," in their Hindustani renderings, com