‘Fairy tales’ and ‘bunkum’: Marie Corelli, Artefacts and Fabrications

This chapter centres on the spectral stories and rumours which orbited ancient Egyptian artefacts in the possession of literary authors, along with the Egyptological connections such authors made. It focuses on Marie Corelli, her one-time friend Oscar Wilde, reading Wilde’s scarab ring that recalled the rare and expensive objects in his own writings as finding a literary counterpart in Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895). Corelli’s devil is Wilde’s double, Wilde’s scarab ring represented as a live beetle within which resides the soul of a mummified princess. Such a depiction, this chapter claims, reflects Corelli’s condemnation of Wilde, and decadence more broadly. Also considered is a necklace that Corelli was given by Sir John Aird, partially comprised of ancient Egyptian beads. This object’s renderings in a heretofore neglected archival source along with Corelli’s lifelong companion’s memoirs, illuminate her belief that ancient Egyptian jewellery allowed spiritual connections between the ancient and modern worlds. Ultimately, this chapter unearths how Corelli, proposing that she was a reincarnated Egyptian princess, fashioned herself as an alternative Egyptological authority at odds with masculine, scholarly Egyptology represented by figures such as E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum.