MISS MARIE CORELLI.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1, 22 April 1914, Page 4

MISS MARIE CORELLI.

Miss Marie Corelli has, in a remarkable outburst, given the world a satirical estimate of her rivals in literature and at the same time has expressed her independence of the reading public, in a letter to. the "Birmingham Daily Mail," which had published a paragraph asking: "Where is Miss Marie Corelli?" After stating that she is very much alive'and in possession of all her faculties, she writes: "1 have certainly withdrawn for a time into a retired literary corner overpowered by the crowd of stupendous geniuses (according to publishers' advertisements) who occupy it. considering it but just. and decent to stand aside out of the glittering galaxy of these many marvels of the,age who (if publishers' advertisements and newspaper booms mean anything) have arrived unto their own— gifted beings who can be nothing less than Shakespeare and the classics re-embodied, even eclipsing those overrated, wellnigh mythical personages, so say nothing of such out-of-date authors as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and Bronte. I am not waiting till clouds roll by, but only till the dazzling procession of publishers' planets sweep onward in their brilliant course, leaving trails of Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, De Morgan fire behind them. Then perhaps I may venture humbly forth with a little book in a limited edition, of which Birmingham may perhaps generously purchase one copy. I put it at this modest figure because from my very first beginnings I have never suited the literary taste of Birmingham, though this distressing state of things has not yet moved me to tears." Miss Corelli goes on to say: "What readers want they will have, and if they do not want me, 1 do not want them, and there need be no strained relations between us."