On the day following Marie Corelli's death in 1924 a journalist in the London Times attempted to articulate the reasons for her enormous, though curious, popularity:

Even the most lenient critic cannot regard Miss Corelli's works as of much literary importance. They were chiefly tracts, written in an emotional and melodramatic style of invective against some of her pet aversions, of which, being a good hater, she had many.... She was deficient in humour, a sense of proportion, and an understanding sympathy with human nature. But she possessed in large measure the magic gift of telling a story, however wild and improbable it might be, and to that more than to anything else her great popular success is attributable.

Corelli did have a fervid imagination that infused her fiction with a passion that held her readers spellbound, regardless of the bizarre machinations or cloying sentimentality of her often-fantastic plots...