ABSTRACT
Forgotten today, Marie Corelli was by far the best-selling English novelist at the turn of the last century. Lacking any scientific education, she managed to capture the significant scientific and technological discoveries of her time in sometimes outrageous fictions that caught the popular imagination. With blissful confidence and supreme ignorance, she engaged with some of the leading intellectual figures of her day, to the delight of her reading public. With an idiosyncratic religious blend of Christianity and fashionable theosophy, she adapted Darwinian evolution for her own purposes, drawing the imagination of her readers who felt also the waning power of the Christian faith.
