Corelli is generally accepted to have been the inspiration for at least two of E. F. Benson's characters in his Lucia series of six novels and a short story. The main character, Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas, is a vain and snobbish woman of the upper middle class with an obsessive desire to be the leading light of her community, to associate with the nobility, and to see her name reported in the social columns, coupled with a comical pretension to education and musical talent, neither of which she possesses. She also pretends to be able to speak Italian, something Corelli was known to have done. Miss Susan Leg is a highly successful writer of pulp romances under the pseudonym Rudolph da Vinci. In E.F. Benson's "Secret Lives" a famous novelist Susan Leg, writes a book in which the heroine is another writer - Serena Lomond. This character is meant to be very similar to Susan herself, but in fact Serena Lomond is the spit of Mavis Clare in Marie Corelli's "The Sorrows of Satan". The character makes her appearance in Benson's work a few years after Marie Corelli's death in 1924.