The Secret Power: A Romance of the Time

Marie Corelli

Jan 1921 · Library of Alexandria

Ratings and reviews

I wish I could remember what it was that put this on my to-read list… and wreak my vengeance upon that. This book was insultingly, stupefyingly, gobsmackingly awful. It was also sexist, classist, and racist. You might wonder if the poor quality takes the edge off the prejudice. No, it doesn’t. Ms. Corelli seemed to really believe, and to expect her readers to believe, that a story centered around an endlessly blessed, ingenious, and perfect heroine would make sense, and convey useful lessons, because of the magical northern-Scottish whiteness of the character. Of course she never thinks a wrong thought, or speaks an errant word, or is inconvenienced by rough travel or poor weather. Because she’s just that white, y’see? Seriously, there’s not a drop of rain in the whole narrative. The reader has no need to see the characters grow through adversity because the characters are all perfectly what they wish themselves to be the whole time. The reader understands that certain characters are in love with certain others because the author says they are. And every character is descended from the aristocracy of some earlier age. It is an indictment of the readers of popular English-language fiction a century ago that this book was popular. It is an indictment of those readers that its author was among the first celebrity novelists as we recognize them today. All that having been said and being what’s important, I was also amazed that the events of the narrative, published two decades before the war, include a surprisingly prescient description of an atomic explosion (even described as “the condensation of radio-activity”) and a recognizable sketch of what atomic ethics would concern.