Mary Mackay, know by her pseudonym Marie Corelli (1855–1924), was one of the most popular and bestselling novelists of the late Victorian period, her books selling in the millions of copies worldwide. Sales of Corelli’s novels exceeded the combined sales of popular contemporaries including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, although critics often derided her work as “the favorite of the common multitude."
