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100 years after her death, Stratford plans to celebrate the life Marie Corelli




AUTHORS and academics plan to celebrate the centenary of a 19th century author who outsold Charles Dickens, and helped restore Stratford’s iconic Tudor looks.

Marie Corelli, who died in 1924, will be remembered from 3rd-5th May with talks, exhibitions, readings, a Victorian song recital and a garden party.

Those teaming up to host the two-day event are drawn from The Stratford Society, the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham University and Loughborough University.

To kick-off the celebrations, Dr Robert Bearman will give a talk about Corelli’s life and work at a Stratford Society meeting on 3rd April.

Stratford author Jann Tracy is chairwoman of the Stratford Society and on the steering group for the centenary celebrations. She spent years researching and writing a book Marie Corelli: Shakespeare’s Champion, which was published in 2018.

In it she explains Corelli was the best-selling author of her day, eclipsing Charles Dickens, HG Wells and Wilkie Collins combined.

Marie Corelli, above, and her grave at Stratford Cemetery.
Marie Corelli, above, and her grave at Stratford Cemetery.

One of her biggest fans was Queen Victoria who, it’s said, insisted on being sent a copy of each new book.

Corelli, who penned 30 novels and many short stories, poems and magazine articles, came to live in Stratford in 1899.

She rented Hall’s Croft, in Old Town, before moving to the Dower House nearby. Then, in 1901, she bought Mason Croft, in Church Street, where she stayed until her death in 1924.

Her other legacy is as a champion of conservation, as she helped restore many of the town’s best-known buildings including Harvard House in High Street and the public library in Henley Street.

She paid for stucco, also known as ‘render’, to be carefully taken off buildings so that the original Tudor structures underneath could be once again admired.

Jann told the Herald: “When I found out more about Marie Corelli, I was amazed there was very little about her and her work, apart from a blue plaque outside her home, Mason Croft, and one at the Firs Gardens, which Corelli bought in 1910 and preserved as open space for townsfolk.

“This woman was a best-selling author who transformed so many buildings in Stratford.

“Anything Tudor was her ideal and if it wasn’t for her, the town would look very different today.”

Jann, a retired academic library and museum worker who lives in Stratford, is now working on a book about other women who made a major mark on the town but have been airbrushed out of history.

She explained: “While writing my Corelli book, I came across other women who seem to have passed into history, largely unsung.

“I’m trying to bring all these women to the forefront, since they’ve all disappeared into Stratford’s history.”

One of those she highlights in her forthcoming book, to be published in May 2024, is the “feisty, talented and popular” Annie Justins who became the town’s first female mayor.

Another is vicar’s wife Eleanor Melville, who stepped up during the war to become leader of Stratford Land Girls.

Hephzibah Harris, who was born in 1836, was a skilled craftswoman who made thousands of leather gloves in the 1870s.

In her spare time she created intricate patchwork pictures, which she exhibited and sold from her home in Church Street.

In fact, her art was thought so beautiful it was displayed in the town hall and the Memorial Theatre, before it burned down in 1926.

The glove-maker took out an advertisement in December 1894 in the Stratford Herald, to publicise one of her shows.

Her artwork has survived but is stowed away out of sight in the RSC’s storage centre in Timothy Bridge Road.

Jann hopes to bring them out for Stratford towns folk to admire once more. She explained: “I have a soft spot for Hephzibah, because she was a total eccentric who did her own thing.

“People would stand outside her house and watch her choosing fabrics for her pictures, and she’d charge tuppence for them to go in and look at her art.”

She added: “I’d like to help organise an exhibition of her work in 2026, as that will be 100 years since the Memorial Theatre burned down and her work effectively disappeared from view.

“It would be lovely because her pictures were made to be seen and it is extremely sad to think of them languishing all those years in the storage unit.

“But that’s for the future – for now, we’re concentrating on our plans to mark the centenary of Marie Corelli, a woman who truly left her mark on Stratford-upon-Avon.”

To find out more about the Corelli Centenary event in May 2023, go to www.stratfordsociety.co.uk and search under ‘what we do’.



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