The Thomas Cook of the Victorian Literary Market: Marie Corelli's Gothic Touristic Imagination in Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897)

Marie Corelli's reputation as a gothicist and early practitioner of the ‘weird’ lags behind those of her contemporaries who wrote in the same milieu, and yet her 1897 paranormal romance Ziska places her in league with others experimenting in the Egyptianised Gothic mode at the end of the nineteenth century, or the fin de siècle. Unlike contemporaries Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, or Guy Boothby, Corelli did not travel to many of the places she wrote about, including the grand hotels of Cairo among which Ziska is set. Corelli's vivid portrait of a glittering Egyptian ‘season’ is therefore an example of her touristic imagination, or as Bertha Vyver wrote, ‘all Marie needs is Baedeker’.

This article explores the ways in which Corelli uses a tourist season in Egypt to Gothic effect. Tourism for Corelli functions as a metaphor for modernity and embodies a number of its discontents. Therefore, the subject of tourism was ripe for Gothic representation by Corelli who had also come to embody a number of the era's cultural and social anxieties herself as a woman author of popular Gothic romances. In the context of her particular place in the late-Victorian literary market, I further argue that in many vital ways, Corelli was to Victorian publishing what the iconic tour provider Thomas Cook was to tourism by the late nineteenth century in terms of their shared cultural reception.