She: A History of Adventure Read online

  1 Ayesha

  2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Introduction copyright © 2002 by O. W. Toad Ltd.

  Biographical note, notes, note on the text, and reading-group guide

  Copyright © 2002 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider), 1856–1925.

  She: a history of adventure / H. Rider Haggard; introduction by

  Margaret Atwood; illustrations by Maurice Greiffenhagen and Charles H.M. Kerr; notes by James Danly.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80802-8

  1. Ayesha (Fictitious character : Haggard)—Fiction. 2. Women—Africa—Fiction.

  3. Reincarnation—Fiction. 4. Immortalism—Fiction. 5. Africa—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR4731 .S6 2002

  823′.8—dc21

  2001044583

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  H. RIDER HAGGARD

  Henry Rider Haggard, who was to become one of the most popular authors of his era, was born in Bradenham, Norfolk, England, on June 22, 1856. His father, William Meybohm Rider Haggard, the scion of an old Norfolk family—the Haggards claimed descent from a Danish knight—was the third squire of Bradenham, an estate comprising several hundred acres. His mother, Ella Doveton Haggard, had been raised, in part, in Bombay. An amateur writer, she published, in 1857, a poem called “Myra, or the Rose of the East: A Tale of the Afghan War.”

  Rider, the sixth son and eighth child of ten children, was considered in his childhood, particularly by his father, to be a dull-witted daydreamer. His mother, though, saw something of her own creative nature in him and encouraged his imagination. In a story that Haggard’s daughter Lilias told in her biography of her father, and which may or may not be precisely true, young Rider was pacified—or at least controlled—at bedtime by his nurse’s leaving him in the charge of “a disreputable doll of particularly hideous aspect, with boot-button eyes, hair of black wool and a sinister leer on its painted face.” The doll was called “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” a name Rider Haggard eventually found significant literary use for.

  Owing to his father’s contempt, Rider was denied the proper education his brothers received, and he was haphazardly taught at a London day school and at Ipswich Grammar School. He failed the army entrance examination in 1873, at which point his father sent him to London to a “crammer” to prepare for work in the Foreign Service.

  In London, Haggard met Lady Anne Paulet, a Spiritualist whose séances he attended; after one particularly alarming session he swore off Spiritualism for life (though he’d often write about it). He also met and fell in love with Mary Elizabeth Jackson, called “Lilly,” the daughter of a rich Yorkshire farmer. Rider’s father opposed the romance, and Rider, self-conscious of his lack of money and position, refrained from proposing marriage.

  In 1875, he was sent by his father to the British colony of Natal, in southern Africa, to be the unpaid secretary to Sir Henry Bulwer, Natal’s lieutenant governor (and a nephew of the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton). On his visits to the interior, Haggard learned much of the history, language, and customs of the Zulu people, whom he would write about most notably in King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and in his Zulu trilogy: Marie (1912), Child of Storm (1913), and Finished (1917).

  He became the protégé of Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the secretary of native affairs, assisting Shepstone on his mission to annex the Transvaal for the British government, as well as helping to raise the British flag in Pretoria in 1877. Eventually Haggard became the master and registrar of Transvaal’s High Court.

  By now firmly established in his career, Haggard intended to return to England to propose to Lilly, but his father angrily wrote him, demanding he stay where he was and concentrate on his work. Eventually, Lilly wrote to announce that she was marrying someone else. Haggard was to love her until he died, and harbored some hope that they would be reunited in the afterlife.

  Still, he did return to England, where he met and married, in 1880, the heiress Mariana Louisa Margitson, known as “Louie.” (This time the opposition came from her side, from an uncle who thought Haggard an undeserving match for his niece.) With his bride, he moved back to southern Africa, to Transvaal, where Haggard owned a share in an ostrich farm, just before the outbreak of the first Anglo-Boer War. As conditions grew dangerous, they returned to England with their newborn son, Arthur John (“Jock”). (The Haggards would have four children: Jock, Agnes Angela, Dorothy, and Lilias.)

  Back home, Haggard studied the law, and was admitted to the bar in 1884. He scarcely practiced, though, as he was already fixated on a career as a writer. His first book, a work of nonfiction called Cetywayo and His White Neighbours; or, Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, was published in 1882. He also wrote two not very successful novels, Dawn (1882) and The Witch’s Head (1884).

  Haggard’s literary and financial fortunes changed, as the story goes, because of a five-shilling bet with one of his brothers that he could pen a more successful novel than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Haggard dashed off King Solomon’s Mines—rapid composition and scant rewriting were to be hallmarks of his oeuvre—in six weeks. After his publisher littered London with handbills promoting “the most amazing story ever written,” the African adventure novel, featuring a search for lost diamonds, a treasure map, a noble black king in exile, and a malignant witch, was a furious success (though Stevenson sent Haggard a friendly letter warning of the dangers of writing too quickly). By September 1885, thirty thousand copies of the novel had been sold in England, and in Haggard’s lifetime well over a half million copies would be printed.

  In 1887, Haggard published the novels Jess and Allan Quatermain, a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines in which the hero was killed off (“Well, he died” is how Haggard, in part, phrases it); like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, though, Quatermain wouldn’t stay dead, and Haggard eventually revived him for a total of sixteen full-length novels and numerous short stories.

  More significantly in 1887, Haggard wrote She: A History of Adventure. “The fact is,” he said, “that it was written at a white heat, almost without rest…. I remember that when I sat down to the task my ideas as to its development were of the vaguest. The only clear notion that I had in my head was that of an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love. All the rest shaped itself round this figure.” She, telling of a lost African kingdom ruled by a cruel two-thousand-year-old queen, Ayesha, also known as “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” was an even greater success than King Solomon’s Mines, and since its publication has captured the imaginations of countless readers, from Freud, who recommended it to a patient as “a strange book, but full of hidden meaning [about] the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions,” to C. S. Lewis, Graham Greene, J.R.R. Tolkien, and even Henry Miller. Haggard’s biographer Morton N. Cohen found in Ayesha a quintessential femme fatale, “the heartless beauty, the eternally pitiless woman. Ayesha, huge, cold, and beautiful, passes in [the] parade of fictional Victorian superwomen. She is a closer blood relative to Wilde’s Salomé … than to the fainting heroines in Haggard’s modern novels or to the characters in the books for boys with whom [She] is often shelved.” Geoffrey O’Brien, in the Voice Literary Supplement, has note
d, “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.”

  Some of She’s—and, generally, Haggard’s—success may derive from an ability to address a readership on its own terms. The writer John Hallock has commented, “Necrophilia, embalming, and a curious mixture of the modern and the magical illustrate how Haggard meshes the familiar with uncharted realms. The narrator in She places a perfectly preserved foot in a Gladstone bag,* and a native goddess is compared with Mary, Queen of Scots. A secret pit leading to a fire of rejuvenation is measured by the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral; the main thoroughfare of the Temple of Truth is the width of the embankment of the Thames River.” However, this mass appeal of Haggard’s did not endear him to the critical establishment; though Haggard had his defenders, he was often harshly judged. (A self-delighted essay he published on the art of fiction writing and occasional whiffs of plagiarism in his work may not have helped matters.)

  She was immediately dramatized in a production that opened at London’s Gaiety Theatre in September 1888, and Ayesha has also been popular with filmmakers: The pioneering Frenchman Georges Méliès adapted the novel as The Pillar of Fire in 1899, and the American Edwin S. Porter filmed She in 1908; further versions appeared in 1911, 1916, 1917 (with the vamp Valeska Surratt), 1925 (with Betty Blythe), 1935 (from the creators of King Kong and featuring Helen Gahagan, better known as Helen Gahagan Douglas, “the Pink Lady,” Richard Nixon’s later—and besmirched—rival for a congressional seat), and 1965 (with Ursula Andress and horror-movie stalwarts Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing). King Solomon’s Mines has also been a staple of the cinema, and in the wake of the Indiana Jones movies—which owe a great debt to Haggard—Richard Chamberlain twice played Allan Quatermain (in the company of Sharon Stone).

  Haggard would return to Allan Quatermain in, among other works, Allan’s Wife and Other Tales (1899), The Ancient Allan (1920), and Allan and the Ice-Gods (published posthumously in 1927), in which—in a plot partly suggested by Haggard’s good friend Rudyard Kipling—the hero, in a drug-induced reverie, relives a past life as a caveman at the dawn of the Ice Age. Haggard would also revisit his most memorable female creation: Ayesha: The Return of She, depicting She’s miraculous reappearance in a Tibetan temple of Isis, was published in 1905; She and Allan, a prequel uniting Haggard’s two “stars,” was published in 1921, and Wisdom’s Daughter, another prequel, in which Haggard describes more fully Ayesha’s origins, came out in 1923.

  The years 1885–90 were Haggard’s most productive and inspired, and his works were continually serialized and widely read. The death of his beloved mother in 1889 and of his young son, Jock, a little more than a year later, were devastating blows, however; though Haggard continued to write compulsively, the quality of his work and his fortunes took a downturn. Still, there are numerous titles to consider: Among Haggard’s fifty-odd novels are Cleopatra (1889), written after his first trip to Egypt, a land that had fascinated him since he was a boy, in 1887; a Viking novel, Eric Brighteyes (1891), composed after an 1888 visit to Iceland; Montezuma’s Daughter (1894), the result of research done on the trip to Mexico during which Haggard and his wife learned of Jock’s death; Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies (1903), a supernatural love story involving communication with the dead through the use of radio waves; Pearl-Maiden: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem (1903); Moon of Israel: A Tale of the Exodus (1918), which was particularly popular in a Yiddish translation; and When the World Shook (1919), involving citizens of Atlantis revived from suspended animation after 250,000 years. In 1911, inspired by an encounter with the ghost of one of his hunting dogs, which convinced him that animals had immortal souls just as people do, Haggard wrote The Mahatma and the Hare, and never hunted again.

  Haggard was also an expert on agricultural and social conditions in England, and wrote often on gardening, agricultural reform, and rural life. Among his works on these subjects are A Farmer’s Year (1899), Rural England (1902), and The Poor and the Land (1905). Though Haggard’s 1895 attempt to gain a seat in Parliament was unsuccessful, he served on government commissions on the Salvation Army and on the erosion and deforestation of land, and in this service he toured the world extensively. Haggard was honored as a Knight Bachelor in 1912, and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1919.

  In his last years, his popularity dwindled (he made more money from selling the film rights to his books than he did from publishing them) and his eccentricities increased: Formerly an ardent Zionist, he withdrew his support for the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine and became notably anti-Semitic. (There are occasional bursts of anti-Semitism in Haggard’s fiction, too, along with the unfortunately pervasive sexism and racism that may be attributable to the mind-set of his era but which can be hard for a modern reader to take anyway.)

  After a final visit to Egypt in 1924, where, in the aftermath of the King Tut sensation, he was disappointed to find “the ancient land & degraded with tourists, harlots, and brass bands,” he developed a bladder infection and died in a London nursing home on May 14, 1925. He was sixty-eight. His last novel was Belshazzar, completed in 1924 and published in 1930. His autobiography, The Days of My Life, appeared in 1926.

  V. S. Pritchett, commenting bemusedly on Haggard’s enduring popularity, said, “Mr. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the unconscious; [Haggard] installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the people’s secret desires.”

  *After She’s serialization in The Graphic magazine, Haggard made numerous changes, most of them minor, in the initial hardcover printing and in “New Edition”s published in 1888 and 1891. Most of the changes concerned issues of diction, but notably removed from the text were many of its topical references and contemporary brand names. Though the 1888 edition mentions a Gladstone bag, the reader of the present volume, taken from Haggard’s ultimate version, will find references only to a “travelling bag” or “handbag.”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  INTRODUCTION by Margaret Atwood

  SHE

  INTRODUCTION

  I. MY VISITOR

  II. THE YEARS ROLL BY

  III. THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS

  IV. THE SQUALL

  V. THE HEAD OF THE ETHIOPIAN

  VI. AN EARLY CHRISTIAN CEREMONY

  VII. USTANE SINGS

  VIII. THE FEAST, AND AFTER!

  IX. A LITTLE FOOT

  X. SPECULATIONS

  XI. THE PLAIN OF KÔR

  XII. “SHE”

  XIII. AYESHA UNVEILS

  XIV. A SOUL IN HELL

  XV. AYESHA GIVES JUDGMENT

  XVI. THE TOMBS OF KÔR

  XVII. THE BALANCE TURNS

  XVIII. “GO, WOMAN!”

  XIX. “GIVE ME A BLACK GOAT!”

  XX. TRIUMPH

  XXI. THE DEAD AND LIVING MEET

  XXII. JOB HAS A PRESENTIMENT

  XXIII. THE TEMPLE OF TRUTH

  XXIV. WALKING THE PLANK

  XXV. THE SPIRIT OF LIFE

  XXVI. WHAT WE SAW

  XXVII. WE LEAP

  XXVIII. Over THE MOUNTAIN

  NOTES

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Dedication

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 AYESHA

  3.1 THE CASKET

  3.2 FACSIMILE OF THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS, ONE-HALF SIZE

  3.3 FACSIMILE OF THE REVERSE OF THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS, ONE-HALF SIZE

  4.1 “STEER FOR YOUR LIFE, MAHOMED!”

  7.1 “THOU ART MY CHOSEN.”

  8.1 AND TURNING HALF ROUND ONE AND ALL THEY GRASPED THE HANDLES OF THEIR SPEARS.

  8.2 UP ABOVE THEM TOW
ERED HIS BEAUTIFUL PALE FACE.

  9.1 HOLLY AND BILLALI

  13.1 AYESHA UNVEILS

  14.1 “CURSE HER, MAY SHE BE EVERLASTINGLY ACCURSED.”

  15.1 AYESHA GIVES JUDGMENT.

  19.1 LANTERNS IN KÔR.

  20.1 “COME!”

  21.1 “BEHOLD!”

  22.1 “STRIKE, AND STRIKE HOME!”

  23.1 THE TEMPLE OF TRUTH

  25.1 SHE PAUSED, AND THE INFINITE TENDERNESS IN HER VOICE SEEMED TO HOVER ROUND US LIKE SOME MEMORY OF THE DEAD.

  26.1 “I SAW THE ESSENCE RUN UP HER FORM.”

  27.1 “I SWUNG TO AND FRO.”

  INTRODUCTION

  Margaret Atwood

  When I first read Rider Haggard’s highly famous novel She, I didn’t know it was highly famous. I was a teenager, it was the 1950s, and She was just one of the many books in the cellar. My father unwittingly shared with Jorge Luis Borges a liking for nineteenth-century yarns with touches of the uncanny coupled with rip-roaring plots; and so, in the cellar, where I was supposed to be doing my homework, I read my way through Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle, and Dracula and Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells, and also Henry Rider Haggard. I read King Solomon’s Mines first, with its adventures and tunnels and lost treasure, and then Allan Quatermain, with its adventures and tunnels and lost civilization. And then I read She.

  I had no sociocultural context for these books then—the British Empire was the pink part of the map, “imperialism and colonialism” had not yet acquired their special negative charge, and the accusation “sexist” was far in the future. Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading. Any book that began with some mysterious inscriptions on a very old broken pot was fine with me, and that is how She begins. There was even a picture at the front of my edition—not a drawing of the pot, but a photograph of it, to make the yarn really convincing. (The pot was made to order by Haggard’s sister-in-law; he intended it to function like the pirate map at the beginning of Treasure Island—a book the popularity of which he hoped to rival—and it did.)