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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "A Romance of Two Worlds", Marie Corelli weaves a rich tapestry of spiritual and romantic themes, exploring the intersection of the material and ethereal realms. Set against a backdrop of opulence and mysticism, the novel follows the journey of its protagonist, a visionary artist, who grapples with the insights gained from his experiences in the astral plane. Corelli's prose is characterized by its lyrical quality and vivid imagery, which invites readers into a world where love transcends the boundaries of corporeal existence. The narrative is a reflection of the late Victorian obsession with spiritualism and the quest for deeper meaning in life, anchored by Corelli's distinctive fusion of melodrama and philosophical inquiry. Marie Corelli, an influential figure in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was known for her unconventional views and mystical beliefs, which resonated with her contemporaries. Her background in music and literature, combined with her passion for exploring metaphysical concepts, undoubtedly shaped her narrative approach in this novel. Corelli, often labeled the 'Queen of the Best Sellers,' utilized her platform to challenge societal norms, advocating for spiritual awakening and self-discovery through her characters' experiences. For those captivated by themes of duality between the physical and spiritual realms, "A Romance of Two Worlds" is an essential read. Corelli's masterful storytelling invites readers to ponder profound questions about love, existence, and the unseen forces that shape our lives, making it a timeless work that continues to resonate with audiences seeking both romance and philosophical depth. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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A Romance of Two Worlds
Table of Contents
Introduction
Poised between bodily frailty and a longing for transcendence, this novel asks whether modern claims of scientific power can truly answer the soul’s oldest hunger for meaning, healing, and revelation.
A Romance of Two Worlds, published in 1886, introduced Marie Corelli to Victorian readers as a writer unafraid to fuse spiritual speculation with popular storytelling. Often described as a metaphysical romance with elements of speculative fiction, it unfolds in a European milieu recognizable to late nineteenth-century audiences while reaching beyond it toward visionary realms. The book emerges from a cultural moment fascinated by electricity, psychical research, and debates about faith in an age of science. Within that context, Corelli offers a narrative that is both fashionable and defiantly earnest, seeking to reconcile empirical curiosity with devotion and moral purpose.
At its outset, the novel presents a first-person narrator whose failing health and creative exhaustion prompt a search for relief outside conventional medicine. Drawn to a charismatic figure who combines scientific language with spiritual discipline, the narrator undertakes an experimental course of treatment that reframes vitality as a form of cosmic energy. Carefully paced episodes, presented as recollection and testimony, lead from physical convalescence toward heightened perception. The premise is less an adventure of events than a voyage of inner states, making the initial chapters a quiet invitation to enter a world where metaphysics, art, and the everyday cityscape coexist.
Corelli’s storytelling blends confessional candor with the cadences of a sermon and the allure of a salon conversation. Readers encounter philosophical dialogues, rhapsodic descriptions, and arresting images designed to render intangible forces with sensory clarity. The style is ornate yet direct in its appeal to feeling, and it alternates between contemplation and dramatic flourish. Music recurs as a guiding motif, shaping both the narrator’s temperament and the book’s language, which often strives to achieve the sweep of a symphonic movement. The result is an experience that favors intensity over restraint, inviting immersion rather than detached observation.
Thematically, the novel probes the boundary between material explanations and spiritual claims, using electricity as a resonant metaphor for unseen influence and moral connection. It considers how artistic inspiration arises, whether personal suffering can transform character, and what it means to seek authority—scientific, mystical, or divine—over the self. Corelli frames these questions through intimate crises rather than abstract treatises, grounding inquiry in bodily weakness, creative desire, and the hope of renewal. The narrative also reflects a wider Victorian curiosity about invisible agencies, from nerves and magnetism to conscience and grace, asking where responsibility and revelation meet.
Contemporary readers may find in this book an early exploration of ideas now circulating in discussions of mind–body wellness, spiritual experience, and the ethics of self-improvement. Its historical value lies in showing how a popular novelist translated complex debates into a compelling, accessible form. Corelli was widely read in her lifetime, and this debut helped establish her public profile by striking a chord with anxieties and aspirations shared across social circles. Today, the novel’s blend of skepticism and yearning remains recognizable, raising questions about authority, belief, and the costs of consolation that are still pertinent.
Approached with openness to its imaginative framework, A Romance of Two Worlds offers a reflective, atmospheric journey rather than a puzzle to be solved. It rewards readers who enjoy richly embroidered prose, unabashed moral seriousness, and speculative conversations anchored in everyday dilemmas. Without relying on secrecy for its power, the book builds momentum through the narrator’s evolving capacities for perception and trust, keeping the focus on interior movement. As an introduction to Corelli’s project, it provides a vivid portal to a Victorian attempt at synthesis—an invitation to consider how the will to heal might harmonize with the demands of truth.
Synopsis
A Romance of Two Worlds opens with a young pianist-narrator whose health and spirits have failed under the strain of performance and disillusion. Conventional remedies prove ineffective, and her malaise deepens into a quiet despair that clouds her art and her faith. In European artistic circles she hears of an extraordinary physician-mystic reputed to heal by unusual means. Drawn by necessity rather than belief, she seeks his counsel. The novel introduces its central tension here: the divide between visible, material existence and an unseen order that may govern, heal, and inspire it. This premise frames the story’s movement from crisis toward discovery.
The narrator meets Heliobas, a scholar-physician whose method blends disciplined inquiry with a doctrine he calls the Electric Creed. He posits that life is sustained by a universal force akin to electricity, harmonizing body and soul when rightly directed. His regimen is exact: measured diet, rest, gentle magnetism, and focused concentration that resembles prayer. He refuses blind faith, encouraging questions and careful observation. The narrator, skeptical yet receptive, consents to treatment. Early sessions restore calm and sleep, hinting at deeper change. Heliobas outlines a twofold existence—material and spiritual—suggesting that health, character, and inspiration are conditions of balance between these realms.
As strength returns, instruction deepens. Heliobas explains the gradations of force within human beings—will, emotion, intellect—describing them as currents that can be trained or dissipated. He warns that misuse of this power magnifies faults as readily as virtues. Through conversations that juxtapose laboratory demonstrations with metaphysical analogies, the narrator confronts a new framework: the soul as the positive principle, matter the negative, with harmony achieved through moral intent. She remains cautious, testing ideas against experience. Gradual improvement in her playing suggests that art, too, is a conductor of this force, shaping audiences and performer alike when sincerity and discipline are present.
The narrative broadens to include acquaintances within Heliobas’s circle: a celebrated singer whose voice seems charged with an inexplicable magnetism, an earnest young artist wrestling with ambition, and domestic figures whose quiet faith steadies the household. Conversations range from music’s ethical power to the limits of fashionable skepticism. Small incidents—a performance that stirs unusual fervor, a dispute resolved by unexpected gentleness—illustrate the doctrine in practice without overt instruction. These scenes keep the story anchored in social reality, showing how temperament, vanity, and generosity respond to the same subtle influences. The narrator observes closely, recognizing in others reflections of her own former uncertainties.
When health and confidence stabilize, Heliobas proposes a controlled experiment designed to clarify the relation of the two worlds. Under strict safeguards, the narrator undertakes a guided inward journey, an experience described in luminous, symbolic imagery. A presence, benign and authoritative, acts as interpreter while the soul perceives an order beyond sensory limits: harmonies of motion, gradations of light, and a law that relates action to consequence with unerring precision. Scenes of earthly struggle appear within a wider compassion, reframing pain and aspiration. The episode avoids dogma, presenting perception rather than argument, and leaves the narrator with a sober awareness rather than ecstasy.
Returning to ordinary consciousness, she resumes daily routines under Heliobas’s caution that heightened sensitivity must be governed by humility. The world seems sharpened rather than changed: motives appear clearer, art carries weight, and idle words feel costly. She revises her practice, shaping programs with an eye to integrity instead of display. Friendships deepen as she recognizes the burdens others carry beneath success. Offers of distraction and flattery test her resolve. The new perspective continually meets the old habits of self, and the novel emphasizes effort—quiet choices repeated over time—over sudden transformation. The Electric Creed functions less as spectacle than as a steady rule of conduct.
Parallel tensions gather around her companions. The singer faces a professional temptation that could distort her gift for immediate acclaim. The young artist confronts a conflict between honesty and fashionable taste. In both cases, the narrative shows how desire, fear, and pride can misalign inner forces and produce outward turmoil. The narrator’s counsel remains unobtrusive; Heliobas offers principles but refuses to coerce. Settings shift between salons and chapels, where applause and silence test the same hearts in different ways. A minor crisis exposes how quickly neglected discipline invites confusion, underscoring the book’s theme that power without purpose leads to imbalance and loss.
A culminating sequence gathers the threads at a public event where art, reputation, and private motives intersect. Under pressure, characters reveal their prevailing loyalties. The narrator must apply her lessons in the open, facing both admiration and skepticism. A near-mishap threatens to derail careful progress, yet calm intention and measured action restore order. The consequences are significant but not sensational, redirecting careers and attachments without finality. The episode affirms that influence need not be theatrical to be decisive. By resolving immediate dangers while leaving larger questions intact, the story underscores its preference for inward victory over outward triumph.
In the closing chapters, the narrator accepts a path that joins performance with responsibility. She continues study with Heliobas yet moves outward, carrying a practical understanding of the two worlds into work and friendship. The novel ends with equilibrium rather than certainty: matter remains the necessary stage of spirit, and spirit the measure of matter’s worth. Its central message is clear—human will can align with a beneficent order through discipline, love, and truthfulness, and such alignment transforms health, art, and conduct. Without prescribing creed or institution, the book presents an intimate account of recovery shaped by a unified view of science and faith.
Historical Context
Published in 1886, A Romance of Two Worlds is set within the late Victorian world of cosmopolitan Europe, principally in the 1880s. Its locales evoke grand hotels, salons, and churches in cities such as London, Paris, and Mediterranean resorts like Nice, sites then linked by expanding rail networks (the Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée line reached Nice in 1864). The ambience is one of electric light and concert culture, where modern science, fashionable medicine, and revived religious curiosity mingle. London’s rapid growth, Parisian salon society, and Catholic spectacles in Rome provide a social backdrop in which questions of faith, health, and artistic vocation intersect. The narrative’s itinerant settings mirror the era’s mobility and the fascination with both technological novelty and ancient mysticism.
Two entwined developments shaped the book’s central conceit: electrification and the popular investigation of invisible forces. Between 1831 and the 1880s, Michael Faraday’s work on electromagnetic induction and James Clerk Maxwell’s field theory (1861–1865) transformed understandings of energy, while public electrification accelerated: Joseph Swan demonstrated a practical incandescent lamp in Britain in 1878; Thomas Edison’s U.S. patent followed in 1879; the Savoy Theatre in London was lit entirely by electricity in 1881; and the Holborn Viaduct power station opened in 1882 as one of the first coal‑fired central stations. Telegraphy after 1866 (the permanent transatlantic cable) and Bell’s telephone patent (1876) habituated the public to long‑distance, unseen communication. Concurrently, experimentalists and savants explored psychical phenomena: William Crookes investigated mediums in 1871–1874, publishing Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874); the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882 to apply scientific method to apparitions, telepathy, and trance. In this milieu, electricity functioned as both a measurable energy and a metaphor for the subtle, the unseen, and the soul’s agency. The novel’s healer‑mystic posits an “electric” or vital current as a curative, a conceit that mirrors the era’s synthesis of physics, electrotherapeutics, and psychical inquiry. The book borrows the language of ether, vibration, and transmission then current in popular science to frame mystical experience as if it were a higher register of the same forces that lit city streets and carried voices over wires, thus converting cutting‑edge public wonders into a vocabulary for spiritual transformation.
Victorian Britain faced a sustained crisis of faith catalyzed by scientific and historical criticism. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) challenged teleological readings of nature, while the Oxford debate of 1860 (Thomas Huxley versus Bishop Samuel Wilberforce) dramatized the clash between new science and ecclesiastical authority. Essays and Reviews (1860) and Bishop J. W. Colenso’s Pentateuch criticism (1862–1863) unsettled traditional scriptural certainties; the First Vatican Council’s declaration of papal infallibility (1870) reasserted Catholic authority amid doubt. The novel responds by proposing a personalized, experiential theology: it affirms moral law and the divinity of love, yet critiques rigid dogma. Its visionary episodes function as a layperson’s reconciliation of science with spiritual assurance.
Medical culture in the 1870s–1880s was marked by debates over nervous illness, particularly in women. George M. Beard coined “neurasthenia” in 1869, and S. Weir Mitchell popularized the “rest cure” in Fat and Blood (1877), advocating isolation, enforced feeding, and inactivity. In Paris, Jean‑Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière (lectures 1872–1893) examined hysteria and hypnosis, shaping European views of nervous disorders. Electrotherapy clinics, nerve tonics, and sanatorium regimens proliferated. The novel’s ailing pianist, rebuffed by conventional treatments, turns to an alternative “electric” cure and spiritual discipline, reflecting contemporary skepticism toward male medical authority and the search for less coercive therapies. Its framing of illness as both physical exhaustion and metaphysical depletion echoes transnational debates on nerves and identity.
The work is steeped in the musical and salon culture of late nineteenth‑century Europe. London’s St James’s Hall (opened 1858) hosted major concerts; Parisian salons connected patrons, virtuosi, and intellectuals; Bayreuth’s festival (first held 1876) symbolized music’s spiritual ambitions. Female virtuosi such as Clara Schumann and Teresa Carreño had established models for women pianists negotiating respectability and professional identity. This milieu supplied venues, audiences, and pressures for a protagonist whose art becomes a conduit for transcendence. The book connects artistic performance to moral responsibility, echoing contemporary debates on the artist’s social role, the commercialization of culture, and the possibility that music—deployed with quasi‑scientific precision—might discipline the nerves and elevate the spirit.
The occult revival and Theosophical currents provided a second powerful matrix. The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Helena P. Blavatsky and Henry S. Olcott, moved its headquarters to Adyar, India, in 1879, popularizing ideas of astral planes, karma, and Eastern esotericism. In 1882, the London Lodge formed; 1884–1885 saw the Coulomb controversy, but public fascination endured, reinforced by translations of Upanishadic and Buddhist texts. Simultaneously, Egyptomania surged: the Deir el‑Bahri royal mummy cache was revealed in 1881; Flinders Petrie began major archaeological work in Egypt in 1880; and the British occupation followed the 1882 Anglo‑Egyptian War. The novel’s Chaldean‑tinged mystic lore, visionary journeys, and Mediterranean settings mirror these currents, appropriating Eastern and ancient Near Eastern motifs to articulate a universal spiritual law framed for Western readers.
Modern travel and resort culture created the social geography the novel inhabits. The expansion of European railways and steamship links fostered seasonal migrations to the Riviera; Nice and Cannes developed grand hotels and promenades after mid‑century (the Promenade des Anglais was enlarged in the 1860s), while Monte Carlo opened its casino in 1863. Health tourism connected spas, seaside climates, and nervous cure regimens. Urban electrification and spectacle were counterbalanced by retreats promising repose. The book’s movements through hotels, salons, and coastal sanctuaries track this pattern, using spaces of leisure and convalescence as laboratories for moral choice. Its contrast between glittering social surfaces and inward renewal reflects the period’s tension between modernity’s stimulation and the yearning for disciplined calm.
As a social and political critique, the book exposes the period’s intertwined injustices: the reduction of persons—especially women—to medical cases, the hollowness of class display, and the sterility of sectarian dogmatism amid rapid technological change. It challenges the authority of coercive cures and clerical gatekeeping by valorizing conscientious self‑discipline, charity, and experiential faith. The language of electricity rebukes a mechanistic culture that harnessed power for profit yet neglected moral responsibility. By embedding Eastern‑coded wisdom within European milieus, it also questions imperial complacency, suggesting that ethical law transcends national and confessional borders. The narrative thus demands that modern knowledge serve humane ends, indicting the spectacle of progress when detached from compassion and spiritual integrity.
