“Je t'aime … moi non plus”: Deconstructing Love in Open Confession to a Man from a Woman

Abstract

The posthumous novel Open Confession to a Man from a Woman (1925) holds an unusual place in Marie Corelli's oeuvre: it presents a change of parameters in that it deconstructs the (Platonic) love ideal promoted elsewhere in her romantic fiction. This essay situates the novel in the context of Corelli's own failed love affair with the painter Arthur Severn and the emergence of literary modernism with not only a widening chasm between “high” and “popular” literature, but also changes in romantic fiction, including an increased sexual explicitness. It suggests that Corelli locates and employs a set of rhetorical and narratological strategies to show that romantic fiction is a calculated masquerade aimed at expressing an unattainable ideal of love.