Innocent Her Fancy and His Fact

by Marie Corelli

Her Fancy and His Fact by Marie Corelli tells the story of a young woman who uncovers startling truths about her parents, sending her life in an unexpected direction. The discovery forces her to confront the past and grapple with the emotional turmoil that follows, throwing her into a future she is not prepared for. The narrative reflects on how hidden secrets can dramatically alter one's identity and the course of life, leaving the individual to navigate uncharted territory. It explores the psychological impact of such revelations and how they lead to a sense of isolation. The story highlights the tension between personal discovery and the inability of those around her to help, revealing the struggle between accepting truth and the overwhelming consequences it brings. As the young woman faces the reality of her newfound knowledge, the plot examines the fragile nature of identity and the emotional cost of uncovering long-held family secrets.

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

Marie Corelli (born Mary Mackay) was a best-selling British novelist of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, whose controversial works of the time often label her as an early advocate of the New Age movement.

In the 1890’s Marie Corelli’s novels were eagerly devoured by millions in England, America and the colonies. Her readers ranged from Queen Victoria and Gladstone, to the poorest of shop girls. In all she wrote thirty books, the majority of which were phenomenal best sellers. Despite the fact that her novels were either ignored or belittled by the critics, at the height of her success she was the best selling and most highly paid author in England.

She was the daughter of poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter Charles Mackay. Her brother was the poet Eric Mackay.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Total guilty pleasure. While some critics have pointed to this as one of Marie Corelli's more socially conscious novels (dealing as it does with the issue of illegitimacy. Marie herself was illegitimate) it's more or less impossible to take it seriously. The heroine, the eponymous Innocent, is not so much innocent as mentally challenged and those characters who rag on her for the accident of her birth are badly constructed strawmen.

For added hilarity, Innocent - like most of Corelli's heroines - is a stone obvious author avatar who is hailed as a literary genius at the tender age of twenty two. The book starts out with her posing in a white dress while doves flock around her, for goodness sake. She's like a Disney princess on steroids; it's amazing.

Seriously worth a read if you want to experience the early 20th century 'sensation novel' in all it's wonderfully silly glory. The dingbat heroine lurches from one self-induced crisis to the next before falling headlong in love with a rakish artist named Amadis de Jocelyn (not even kidding).

I won't spoil the ending but suffice to say this book made me feel like L.M. Montgomery's Miss Josephine Barry, when she was gleefully tearing through the accidentally hilarious offerings of Anne and Diana's 'Story Club'.

[Abhishek Kanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Innocent" by Marie Corelli is the tale of a young woman in England at about the turn of the 20th century who discovers the truth about her parents and this knowledge sets her life on a course for which she is unprepared and for which those around her are powerless to stop.

The book starts out with her posing in a white dress while doves flock around her, for goodness sake, she's like a Disney princess on steroids; it's amazing.

Seriously worth a read if you want to experience the early 20th century 'sensation novel' in all it's wonderfully silly glory. This is a slow work, but the author is good at building mood and suspense, and there are plot twists--most expected, but several not anticipated. If you enjoy the pace of a novel from this period, then you might be interested in this novel.

Beautifully written; there has never been a novel that made me cry until this one. Any one who has experienced a heartbreak of first love, of betrayal, of "not belonging" will love this as well.Ah! A memorable read...

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was by far the most bizarre book I’ve ever read in my life. I honestly don’t even know if I enjoyed it or not but it was a strange, mindblowing experience that I’m glad I had. Innocent is an eighteen year old girl who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Everyone is trying to get her to marry her handsome, kind, intelligent cousin Robin who is going to inherit the farm, but Innocent doesn’t love him and doesn’t want to marry him. Her head is stuffed with strange fanciful ideas about a family ancestor named Amadis de Jocelyn, and she has grown up reading manuscripts in Old French about him. But on basically his deathbed her father reveals that he is not really her father, that a man on horseback who must have been her biological father gave Innocent to him when she was a baby. The man, Armitage, had sent checks to pay for her keep for many years but then stopped suddenly.

Shortly after Innocent’s father dies, selfish Lady Blythe shows up to tell Innocent that she is her mother who cast her off when she was a baby, but now she wants to adopt Innocent and make her heiress to her money and title, since she never had any other children. But Innocent repudiates her mother, saying if you didn’t want me then, you can’t have me now. 200 pages in, Innocent runs away to London, which has been way overdetermined by this point and I was waiting and waiting for this to happen. On the train she meets a man who happens to have been a friend of her biological father Armitage. Then in the house she takes a room in, by coincidence there’s a big portrait of Armitage on the wall because the lady of the house, Miss Leigh, happens to be his cast-off sweetheart. One year later, Innocent has become the most successful author of her day and is rich. I thought this was just wish fulfilment but when I read about the author I discovered this was stark realism—Innocent’s writing career is just like Marie Corelli’s. Innocent’s publisher tells her this:

“‘You won’t let me call you a brilliant author,’ he said, as he shook hands with her—‘Perhaps it will please you better if I say you are a true woman!’
Her hand flashed up in bright gratitude, —she waved her hand in parting—as the brougham glided off. And never to his dying day did that publisher and man of hard business detail forget the radiance of the face that smiled at him that afternoon, —a face of light and youth and loveliness, as full of hope and faith as the face of a pictured angel kneeling at the feet of the Madonna with heaven’s own glory encircling it in gold.”

Then Innocent meets an unscrupulous painter named Amadis de Jocelyn who is distantly related to the one she is so fevered about, and of course she falls in love with him. But:


“The carnal mind can never comprehend spirituality,—nevertheless Jocelyn was a man cultured and clever enough to feel that though he himself could not enter, and did not even care to enter the uplifted spheres of thought, this strange child with a gift of the gods in her brain, already dwelt in them, serenely unconscious of any lower plane.

“[H]e had not gone to such lengths in his love-affair as could result in what is usually called ‘trouble’ for the girl. He had left her unscathed, save in a moral and spiritual sense.”

Unfortunately Innocent is no match for this debased man. Her dialogue is more like this:
“‘Pleasure for others is the only pleasure possible to me. I assure you I’m quite selfish!—I’m greedy for the happiness of those I love—and if they can’t or won’t be happy I’m perfectly miserable!’”

Meanwhile, Lady Blythe confesses to her husband that before they were married, she had an illegitimate child and it’s very awkward to meet Innocent socially. Lord Blythe is shocked and appalled at the unmotherly conduct of his wife and tells her he must bid her farewell. Lady Blythe goes and accidentally overdoses on Veronal and dies. Lord Blythe doesn’t seem to mind about that, but he feels bad about Innocent, so he goes to her and asks if he can adopt her as his daughter. But she says she wants to be independent and make her own way in the world. Then Lord Blythe discovers that Armitage (Innocent’s biological father) is still alive and living as a hobo painter in Italy, and they make plans for Armitage to return to England and legally acknowledge Innocent as his child.

However, meanwhile Jocelyn the painter has cruelly dumped Innocent. Going out of her mind with heartbreak, she somehow makes her way back to the farm where she was raised, in the midst of a terrible storm. Robin and the faithful servant find her raving and confused and put her to bed. In the middle of the night, Innocent wakes up, her mind clear, and tells Robin that now she wants to marry him. He spends a sleepless night wondering whether that will be good for her or not. But in the morning he finds her stone dead!

The book ends by saying that Lord Blythe, Armitage, and Miss Leigh

“made a trio of friends,—a compact of affection and true devotion such as is seldom known in this work-a-day world. They were nearly always together, —and the memory of Innocent, with her young life’s little struggle against fate ending so soon in disaster, was a link never to be broken save by death, which breaks all.”


As weird as this book was, it was nothing on what I learned about the author in Wikipedia. I was most surprised to learn that Corelli was the inspiration for both EF Benson’s Lucia and Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel.