The Treasure of Heaven: a Romance of Riches

The story of David Helmsley, a disillusioned millionaire, who left everything behind and started out "on the tramp" to find truth and love.

Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was the most popular novelist of the turn of the century, outselling Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle by the thousands. For thirty years she was ridiculed by reviewers and the literary elite--Edmund Gosse dismissed her as "that little milliner" -- but these opinions had no impact on her mass appeal. In 1895, with The Sorrows of Satan, she broke all previous publishing records, and by 1906 a Corelli novel sold 100,000 copies a year. The silent film makers were adapting her books well into the 1920s, just one of many measures of her lifelong popularity.