She

A critical edition of H. Rider Haggard's Victorian romance

An intense, powerful tale set in Africa. She is Rider Haggard's greatest romance work. A father's mysterious legacy lures Leo Vincey and his two companions deep into Africa. Traveling over all types of hazardous terrain, they make their way to the kingdom of K'r, where She awaits them. A woman of extraordinary beauty and malice. She is the white Queen of the Amahagger people. She has been waiting for two thousand years for the return of the man she once loved, and she believes that Leo Vincey is this man.

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In 1887 however, Haggard issued another novel, She: A History of Adventure, which does rank with King Solomon's Mines as an enduring adventure tale. In She, a young man discovers that he is the lone descendant of an ancient Egyptian priest who had been executed for having loved a princess. The priest's executioner, a beautiful and jealous queen, still reigns in the faraway city of Kor, and so the hero, Leo Vincey, endeavors to find her. Together with an old friend and a servant, Leo undertakes the dangerous journey to Kor. There Leo eventually meets the queen, Ayesha--also known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed--who believes him to be the reincarnation of the priest she loved, and killed, centuries earlier. Leo, in turn, is hypnotized by her extraordinary beauty and believes himself in love with her even though he senses her evil nature. The novel builds to a climax replete with a pillar of fire and a harrowing escape across a dangerous chasm. "Where pulp exotica tends to offer images of buried treasure found or ancient powers restored, generic resolutions for artificial problems, She raises real dilemmas and leaves them gapingly unresolved, on a note of unattainable desire and irretrievable loss," observed Geoffrey O'Brien in the Voice Literary Supplement.

Henry Rider Haggard (1856 1925) was born in Norfolk, England, the son of a gentleman farmer. After school, he went out to South Africa, where he worked for several years in the Civil Service. In 1879, he changed career, however, and took up ostrich farming. But these were times of upheaval in South Africa, and in 1881 the Transvaal (the part of the country where his farm was) was given back to the Dutch by the British, and he came back to England.

Haggard became a barrister next, but his heart was not in it, and he spent his evenings after work writing books. At the time, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island was a massive bestseller; Haggard (with two mediocre novels for adults behind him), in the course of an argument with his brother, bet a shilling that he could write a book which would be just as good and just as successful. A year later, in 1885, King Solomon's Mines was published and Haggard won his bet! The sequel, Allan Quatermain, followed two years later, the same year as another of his particularly famous books, She. All three books are set in Africa, and the author's familiarity with the country and people is what makes them stand out from the rest of his stories.

In public, Haggard claimed that his novel-writing was just to make money, while his real work was writing and advising the government about agriculture and the British colonies. But the fact that he wrote roughly a novel a year belies this public claim as does the fact that he named his three daughters after heroines in his books.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (he was knighted in 1913, and then again in 1919 for war services) was a tall, angular, rugged man, who could have appeared in oneof his own novels, where the heroines are always beautiful, the heroes are good and strong, and there are adventures every minute of the day. Like the novels of Alexandre Dumas, these are books written for adults, which have been devoured ever since by teenagers.