ABSTRACT
Grant Allen and Marie Corelli would no doubt have been appalled to see themselves made literary bedfellows in any critical history of fi n-de-siècle popular fi ction. Despite a mutual genius for capturing mass taste, they were separated by experience, literary style, attitude to their audience, and personal sentiment. Unlike the musically-trained Corelli, who ecstatically trumpeted the naïve and transcendent qualities of her work, Allen was a failed scientist-cum-philosopher who only turned to what he called the ‘fi lthy lucre’ of fi ction writing when more lofty intellectual pursuits failed to bring in a living wage (‘Physiological Aesthetics and Philistia’ 47). He was as cynical about the writing trade as she was seemingly earnest, and unsurprisingly, this pessimism made him a not infrequent target of Corelli’s vast derision. She referred to him in conversation as a ‘less gifted author’ (Bigland 47) and attacked his repeated insistences that he only wrote trash because the public had no appetite for anything better.1 Corelli’s staunch conservatism and hatred of the New Woman school of fi ction in which he had his most lasting triumph (The Woman Who Did 1895) must certainly have infl amed the politically radical Allen, who no doubt saw in her the eternal Mrs Grundy whose domination of literary taste he so frequently lambasted. Yet behind these animosities, some unexpected convergences exist. Beyond a somewhat overlapping audience, Allen shared with Corelli a tendency to idealize, albeit wistfully, the moral function of the author and a recurrent fascination with the connections between language, identity, and thought. If Corelli attempted to reify the three through class, presenting linguistic and literary purity as essential attributes of the demos who composed her readership, Allen used his self-declared ‘trivial’ romances to complicate contemporary theories on the ability of language to speak the racial identity of both the dark-skinned colonial savage and the white-skinned European cosmopolitan.
