Surviving the past
This is technically the third spun off blog post idea, following on from reading fiction as if it were non-fiction and context. I even duplicated a paragraph from the latter in here. This next one, in fact.
The stuff we have from the past has a lot of survivorship bias. What survives, why, is interesting to me. It's too simple to say 'the best' survives because the past was not a meritocracy. The now is certainly not a meritocracy. And what is 'the best' anyway?
Some of 'the best' has been destroyed or lost. No fault of its own. Some definitely not 'the best' has survived through luck or buoyed along on its white, male credentials.
Bend your brains around this, from Gail Carriger:
The most critically abused scion of Radcliffe was Marie Corelli, who wrote (starting in 1886) a mix of romance, occultism, mystery, and Christian morality. Sales of her novels exceeded the combined sales of her male author compatriots: Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling! Corelli was globally popular, much beloved by readers, and roundly abused by critics as melodramatic and plebeian.
Just... can you believe? Well, yes. I didn't know it but I can certainly believe it.
It's in Carriger's craft book, The Heroine's Journey. Which I loved far more than I expected to. I read it because I'm doing the decolonising writing craft thing and it's one of a few monomyth-for-women books. It's so much more than a craft book though. There's a lot of history and it's angry about this stuff and just generally interesting and enjoyable.
'Radcliffe' in the quote is Ann Radcliffe, of Mysteries of Udolpho fame, which is where most of these thoughts started because, after Northanger Abbey, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
Now, I'm not saying that just because Corelli was a blockbuster and sold more than all these folks she was better than them. However 'the best' works it certainly ain't that. But to be so completely forgotten? That's wild to me.
So even though I'm not at all interested in reading about occultism, mystery, and Christian mythology, I'm going to read Marie Corelli. I've also got Fanny Burney's Evelina lined up.