Marie Corelli

Marie Corelli was the best-selling English novelist of her age, outselling Wells, Kipling and Conan Doyle combined, and the favourite of Queen Victoria and Gladstone. Critics loathed her mystical romances and she loathed them back, refusing review copies. Born Mary Mackay, she invented an Italian ancestry, shaved years off her age, and settled in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she toured the town in a gondola with a Venetian gondolier.