Raised on the prosperous farm of Hugo Jocelyn, Innocent was a descendant of a French knight. She always believed that she was Jocelyn's illegitimate daughter by his fiancée before her death. But things change for Innocent after discovering the truth about her parents. This revelation sets her life on an unexpected path. It is a beautiful and tender love story with several twists and turns that keep the readers curious about Innocent's destiny.
British women who resisted their own enfranchisement were ridiculed by the suffragists and have since been neglected by historians. Yet these women claimed to form a majority of the female public on the eve of the First World War. Julia Bush rediscovers the history of female anti-suffragism in Britain.
Innocent (1914) is a novel by Marie Corelli. Published at the height of Corelli’s career as one of the most successful writers of her generation, the novel combines fantasy and romance to tell a story of self-discovery, ambition, and the ideals of the early feminist movement. Due for reassessment by a modern audience, Innocent is a must read for fans of Victorian literature. Abandoned as a baby, Innocent is raised by Hugo Jocelyn on the ancestral farm of Sieur Amadis, a legendary French knight. Growing up in this idyllic setting, Innocent develops a love for medieval literature while constructing elaborate fantasies about her mysterious origins. When Jocelyn dies, he reveals the identity of her parents: Lady Blythe, a noblewoman; and Pierce Armitage, an artist. Forced to face reality for the first time in her life, Innocent makes her way to London, where she begins a promising career as a professional writer. Despite her early success, Innocent encounters a friend of her parents who, unbeknownst to her, reveals her whereabouts and sets the stage for their reconciliation. While Armitage, now in Italy, prepares to rekindle their relationship, Innocent falls for a vain, manipulative young man who promises her marriage while harboring his own secret motives. Innocent is a tale of a young woman true to her name, a talented and promising young artist who must learn fast in order to avoid disaster. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Marie Corelli’s Innocent is a classic work of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
This collection reappraises and retheorizes Marie Corelli’s diverse fictional writings and locates them in their contemporary literary and social context. Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was a fabulously popular novelist in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Yet, in her day, critics railed against her taste for sentimentality, melodrama, supernatural worlds, and overt didacticism. Many critics are still ambivalent about her writing. However, in their reappraisal, the contributors to this volume largely circumvent the earlier critics and engage afresh with Corelli’s writing strategies; genre choices; representations of social issues; and ideas about science, metaphysics, and morality. Moving beyond the now outdated project of "recovery", the volume also discusses Corelli’s literary market place, analysing both her publishing successes and her decline in popularity. An important theme throughout is Corelli’s troubled relationship with an emerging literary Modernism and an ever-widening gulf between high and popular culture. The contributors interrogate the critical templates, assumptions, and biases of a literary establishment (past and present) centred on Modernist tropes and structures. As a result, the Corelli they unearth is not a defective Modernist but an innovative and original writer who eschewed the dictates of a movement with which she had no empathy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.
