In many ways the author of the book sounds more interesting than the book I have just read. Marie Corelli enjoyed great literary success from the publication of her first novel in 1886 until the First World War. Corelli’s novels sold more copies than the combined sales of popular contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells and Rudyard Kipling, although critics often derided her work as “the favourite of the common multitude'. Apparently she dosed her fiction with mystical new age ideas, she was contemptuous of the press and was something of an eccentric. She lived with a female companion for much of her adult life and critics have noted that often there are erotic descriptions of her female characters in her novels.

A major criticism of her work is that it was overly melodramatic and this is certainly true of Innocent Her Fancy and his Fact, but then again it is unashamedly a romantic novel and a tragic one at that. Corelli’s prose is well written, however her continual striving to create an atmosphere can be a little repetitive. It certainly feels overdone. This is the story of Innocent, who as a young baby is abandoned to the care of an honest farmer by a mysterious stranger on a stormy night. She grows up into a waif like girl who is loved by all on the farm. She discovers some very old books in a trunk in a secret passage in the farm buildings; written on vellum in old French and spends her time translating and falling under the spell of the mysterious knight Sieur Amadis who wrote the books. She is innocent of the fact she is a foundling until the night before her protector (the old farmer) dies. She spurns an offer of marriage from the new young master of the farm who is passionately in love with her and travels to London to make a name for herself. Within two years she has become a famous novelist whose stories are based on the writings of Sieur Amadis. She falls in love with an artist also named Amadis and discovers that she is the daughter of Lady Blythe a cabinet ministers wife. From here on the coincidences and chance meetings pile up in ever more plot driven conventions, making it hard to take in any way seriously.

There are some interesting ideas amongst the gush. The old farmer runs a model farm which bans modern equipment and still manages to produce the best produce for miles around. There is a love of the old methods or the old ways and Innocence could be seen as an allegory of this battle against the mechanised age. The idea of the Sieur Amadis reaching out to Innocent from beyond the grave is well handled and Corelli has put a lot of thought in the character of Innocent herself. She could be seen as a photo feminist in the way she speaks out against the lot of women at the time:

“I do not want to marry anybody. It is the common lot of women - why should they envy or desire it, I cannot think! To give oneself up entirely to a man’s humours - to be glad of his caresses, and miserable when he is angry or tired - to bear his children and see them grow up and leave you for their own betterment as they would call it - oh what an old drudging life - a life of monotony, sickness and pain, and fatigue - and nothing higher done than what animals can do. There are plenty of women of the world who wish to stay at this level………….

Characterisation is strong throughout the book and the self centred lover Amadis is nicely contrasted with the young Robin the new manager of the farm. There are more good and kindly people of both sexes than bad and even the villains of the piece Amadis de Jocelyn and Mrs Blythe are not thoroughly evil.

Marie Corelli was coming to the end of her popularity when she published this book, whose themes looked backwards not forwards. Prosecuted for being a hoarder of food during the war did not help her cause. I tired of this book long before the end as it wound its inevitable route through a set of unlikely events. Not entirely without interest, with its hints of the gothic, but not one of the best books from 1914 that I have read. A 2.5 star read. ( )