page_title: Marie Corelli
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Marie Corelli / Life and writings / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Bertha Vyver
context_page_description: Mary Mackay, known by her pseudonym Marie Corelli, was an English novelist.
  She enjoyed a period of great literary success from the publication of her first novel in 1886 until World War I. Sales of Corelli's novels exceeded the combined sales of popular contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, although critics often derided her work as "the favourite of the common multitude".
context_section_description: Corelli spent her final years in Stratford-upon-Avon. There she fought hard for the preservation of Stratford's 17th-century buildings, and donated money to help their owners remove the plaster or brickwork that often covered their original timber-framed façades. Novelist Barbara Comyns Carr mentions Corelli's guest appearance at an exhibition of Anglo-Saxon items found at Bidford-on-Avon in 1923. Corelli's eccentricity became well known. She would boat on the Avon in a gondola, complete with a gondolier, whom she had brought over from Venice. In his autobiography, Mark Twain, who had a deep dislike of Corelli, describes visiting her in Stratford and how the meeting changed his perception.
  For over forty years, Corelli lived with her companion, Bertha Vyver, to whom she left everything when she died. She did not identify herself as a lesbian, but several biographers and critics have noted the frequent erotic descriptions of female beauty that appear in her novels, although they are expressed by men. 
  Corelli was known to have expressed a genuine passion for the artist Arthur Severn, to whom she wrote daily letters from 1906 to 1917. Severn was the son of Joseph Severn and close friend to John Ruskin. In 1910, she and Severn collaborated on The Devil's Motor, with Severn providing illustrations for Corelli's story. Her love for the long-married painter, her only known romantic attachment to a man, remained unrequited; in fact Severn often belittled Corelli's success.
  During the First World War, Corelli's personal reputation suffered when she was convicted of food hoarding.
  She died in Stratford and is buried there in the Evesham Road cemetery. Later Bertha van der Vyver was buried alongside her.
caption: Bertha Vyver
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