Call Number:

F0875

Repository:

University of Delaware Library Special Collections

Extent:

23 item

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

MSS 0099, F0875, Eric Mackay letters and manuscripts, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Date:

1885-1889, undated (inclusive)

Creator:

Mackay, Eric, 1851-1898

Form:

correspondence and Manuscripts (document genre)

Abstract:

British poet Eric Mackay (1851-1898) was the son of journalist and poet Charles Mackay (1812-1889) and the half-brother of novelist Mary Mackay (1855-1924), who published under the pseudonym Marie Corelli. The collection consists of nineteen autograph letters from Eric Mackay to American editor of The Independent, John Eliot Bowen, and three undated autograph manuscripts of Mackay's prose and poetry. There is also one letter from Mackay to the unnamed editor of the Century Magazine.

British poet Eric Mackay (1851-1898) was the son of journalist and poet Charles Mackay (1812-1889) and the half-brother of novelist Mary Mackay (1855-1924), who published under the pseudonym Marie Corelli. He published several books of poetry in both England and in America, including

Love Letters of a Violinist (1886), A Lover's Litanies (1888), and Song of the Sea (1895), as well as a volume of his father's poetry, Gossamer and Snowdrift: The Posthumous Poems of Charles Mackay (1890).

Mackay also produced an unauthorized play based on Corelli's novel

The Sorrows of Satan, which was a commercial failure. In the final year of his life, Mackay allegedly claimed that he was the true author of Corelli's successful novels. After his death, Corelli circulated a pamphlet refuting his claim of authorship of her work.

"Mackay, Mary." British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Romantic Tradition. Ed. William F. Naufftus.Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 156. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. (reproduced in Literature Resource Center). http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC (accessed September 14, 2010). Mullin, Katherine. "Mackay, Mary."Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2009. www.oxforddnb.com (accessed September 14, 2010).

The collection consists of nineteen autograph letters from British poet Eric Mackay to American editor of

The Independent, John Eliot Bowen, and three undated autograph manuscripts of Mackay's prose and poetry. There is also one letter from Mackay to the unnamed editor of the Century Magazine.

The correspondence concerns Mackay's efforts to place poems (often referring to enclosures, most of which are not included in the collection) with Bowen and

The Independent and more generally, possible opportunities for American publication of and publicity for his books of poetry. One letter mentions Mackay's assessment of his half-sister Mary Mackay's (pseudonym Marie Corelli) novels Vendetta (1886) and A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). He also mentions the possibility of his poem "Choral Ode to Liberty" being read at the Great Inauguration Ceremony held for the Statue of Liberty held in 1886. Additionally, the collection includes manuscripts with minor revisions of a short prose piece, "Anteros," five poems assembled under the heading "Five Sonnets," and a poem entitled "A Song of Servitude."

The letters are arranged in chronological order followed by undated material. The manuscripts are arranged alphabetically by title.