ABSTRACT
In these ways Corelli exerted a tight control over her public image, creating and sustaining an air of mystery about the woman behind the fiction. As a consequence, readers who wanted to find out more about the author had only one source of material-her novels, the majority of which contained heroines who came to be considered, by contemporary reviewers and readers, early twentieth-century biographers, and modern literary critics, as portraits of the artist. As such, these heroines contributed significantly to the construction of Corelli’s public image in the early years of her career and came to be perceived by many commentators as a method of self-promotion. Taking this perception as a starting point, this chapter will examine the construction of two heroines in particular, highlighting the significance Corelli attached to their physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual attributes. I will then go on to discuss the critical responses to these heroines, exploring the inferences that different critics have drawn concerning Corelli’s motivations for adopting such a strategy of self-promotion. Finally, I will address the question of whether it is in fact appropriate to treat Corelli’s heroines as deliberate portraits of the artist, and I will conclude with an examination of what this method of self-advertisement tells us about the nature of Corelli’s engagement with commodity culture.
