Marie Corelli the Writer and the Woman Author:Coates Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV "VENDETTA" AND "THELMA" TO Miss Corelli's host of admirers the story of " Vendetta" must be so familiar as to render a lengthy repetition of it ... more »unnecessary. " Vendetta " is, briefly, an exposition—in the form of a novel—on marital infidelity. In August, 1886, before the book was published, Mr. Bentley wrote: " May I tell you that I have been again looking into ' Vendetta,' and I venture to prophesy a success ? It is a powerful story, and a great stride forward on the first book ... it marches on to its awful finale with the grimness of a Greek play." That Mr. Bentley's prophecy was fulfilled is clearly indicated in a letter addressed by him to the authoress on October 22nd of the same year: " I have very great pleasure in sending the enclosed, because I should have been mortified beyond expression if the public had not responded to the marked power of your story. I believe you will come now steadily to the front, and I am very curious to read your new story. . . ." " I shall yield to no reader of your works," he again wrote, some time afterwards, " in a very high opinion of such scenes as the supper scene in ' Vendetta'—as good as if Bulwer had written it. . . ." As the preface to " Vendetta " tells us, the book's chief incidents are founded on an actual and fatal blunder which was committed in Naples during the cholera visitation of 1884. "Nothing," says the authoress, " is more strange than truth ;—nothing, at times, more terrible ! " " Vendetta" is, then, practically, a true story, and certainly a very terrible one, of a Neapolitan nobleman who, being suddenly attacked by the scourge that was decimating this fair southern city, fell into a coma-like state so closely resembling death that he was hurried into a flimsy coffin, and deposited in his fami...« less