Marie Corelli's Satan and Don Juan in Hell

A critic wrote of The Sorrows of Satan on its publication in 1895, "English society is in such a thoroughly rotten state that it is not surprising that Marie Corelli had to go to hell to find a hero." Bernard Shaw began Man and Superman, with its jewel of a separable dream scene in Hell, in 1901, the year Queen Victoria's reign closed. For years he had been mulling over a play in which Don Juan and the Devil confront each other as respectful—and respectable—equals, and perhaps his ideas for it began to coalesce when he read The Sorrows of Satan and then reviewed a stage adaptation in 1897. Since 1886 he had reviewed her best-selling yet critically excoriated novels, all with a melodramatically religious dimension emanating from late-Victorian agonizing about faith and doubt. An "easygoing God" was "amiable theology," but the nonbelieving Shaw preferred a deity tempered by a Miltonic Satan, the most memorable character in all his many works, a rebellious archangel who had proclaimed, "Evil, be thou my Good."

From the medieval mystery plays with a forked-tail Evil One, through Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Mozart's Don Giovanni and Goethe's Faust, the fallen archangel was an unpleasant figure, but readers and audiences, increasingly sophisticated, were drawn to more likeable qualities and human guises, which made succumbing to temptation more persuasive. The Devil as a cunning, and convivial, English gentleman may not have originated with Corelli or culminated with Shaw. In 1941, C. S. Lewis, then a don at Magdalen College, Oxford, wrote The Screwtape Letters, an epistolary fantasy in which the Devil's attractive if morally inverted character is seen through the fumbling effort of a junior tempter to recruit a young Christian to the cause of "Our Father Below." The Devil is obviously a more attractive literary subject, whether employed for irony or for piety, if he belongs to the right clubs and disguises greed as a good.

Shaw seems to have read all of Miss Corelli's early novels, at least through The Sorrows of Satan, but seldom referred to them beyond his anonymous reviews. "Sometimes," he wrote in his brief preface to The Admirable Bashville, a farce he composed just before he began Man and Superman,

the simple and direct passages [in the Authorized Version of the Bible] were not sentimental enough to satisfy people whose minds were steeped in modern literary sob stuff. For instance, such bald statements were made about Barabbas as that he was a robber, or that he had killed a certain man in a sedition, quite failed to interest anyone in him; but when Marie Corelli expanded this concise information into a novel in her own passionate and richly colored style [in 1893] it sold like hot cakes.

As "G.B.S." in the Saturday Review, writing at length about the play based upon Corelli's novel about religion and contemporary life, Shaw observed: "A sniveling, remorseful devil, with his heart in the right place, sneaking about the railings of heaven in the hope that he will presently be let in and forgiven, is an abomination to me." Her devil, as his would be, is utterly the opposite—until she begins to compromise with her audiences, page and stage. Her Christlike figure, a successful and reclusive lady novelist bearing the author's initials, is immune to worldly rapaciousness, even to the otherworldly Satan, who betrays an amorous interest in her. Most of Corelli's loyal readers were unlike her characters from the venal upper reaches of society, guaranteeing their approval of her strictures.

Curiously, the highest tier in the English class hierarchy was an exception, and possibly for that reason she received royal approbation. As a critic wrote in an occasionally admiring overview of Corelli in the Westminster Review (1906): "When our late Queen ordered all her books to be sent to her this was held to be a crowning proof of Miss Corelli's skill.…" By the Nineties, Victoria's failing sight, clouded by cataracts, made it impossible for her to read anything but boldly enlarged print...