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Author: Born Mary Mackay, she adopted the melodious pseudonym “Maria Corelli” to cultivate an air of Italian sophistication. At the peak of her career, Corelli was more than a popular novelist; she was a veritable publishing sensation, widely believed to have outsold literary giants Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells combined. For a time, she reigned as the most widely read author in the English-speaking world, with a devoted following that included none other than Queen Victoria, who routinely ordered multiple copies of each new Corelli novel for her royal households.

Summary: Maria Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan is far more than a simple Victorian morality tale; it is a provocative and surprisingly modern inversion of the Faustian bargain. The story follows Geoffrey Tempest, a destitute writer who is suddenly lifted from poverty by a mysterious and impossibly wealthy patron, Prince Lucio Rimânez. As Geoffrey is seduced by a world of opulence and high society, he remains unaware that his benefactor is Satan himself, walking the earth not merely to tempt, but to seek his own redemption from a weary God.

The novel’s true brilliance lies in its audacious central argument: Satan’s greatest sorrow is his frustration with a humanity that has grown so inherently corrupt that it damns itself without his effort. In an age consumed by materialism and social climbing, the Devil becomes a strangely sympathetic figure, bored and disillusioned by his easy victories.

What makes The Sorrows of Satan so uniquely unsettling and ultimately so valuable is its function as a mirror. The novel perfectly illuminates an uncomfortable truth: we are often blind to the disadvantages of our own character and the latent darkness within our desires. Corelli doesn’t just have Satan tempt her protagonist with obvious evil; he tempts him with everything society teaches us to crave: wealth, status, influence, and beauty.

The book provokes a roiling mix of emotions, from judgment and superiority to a prickling sense of recognition. The novel tells us the basic idea: it’s not the external devil that is the true horror, but the internal landscape he so easily cultivates.

Personal opinion: After reading Maria Corelli, I feel a renewed and profound responsibility for the opinions I publish on this site. The author powerfully shows that inferior literature acts like a pandemic, rotting the mind. In this light, the critic’s role becomes crucial: our reviews can serve as an antidote, helping society heal, or we can be complicit in its intellectual decline.

While I assume that the melodramatic plot of The Sorrows of Satan might not be for everyone, to dismiss the book on those grounds is to miss its true, enduring power. This is a novel that provokes a startling amount of thought, its central thesis that modern humanity has become so corrupt it no longer needs a tempting devil, lingering long after the final page.

You will for sure not regret the time spent reading this book for the sheer force of its execution. Corelli wields a beautifully venomous pen; her language is quite sumptuous, and her sarcasm towards London’s high society and the literary elite is bitingly precise. The novel possesses a remarkable self-awareness, almost winking at the reader as it dissects the very mechanisms of sin and ambition it portrays. The true pleasure lies in watching Corelli, through the devil’s own mouth, deliver a scathing critique of her age with an intelligence and wit that ensures the book remains a strangely modern and deeply fascinating read.