The Annotated She [antikvár]

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Early in February 1886, Rider Haggard sat down to write She. By the eighteenth of JVlarch he had finished the draft of his manuscript. It was a remarkable performance in a remarkable period of the author's life. Within the space of little more than a year he turned out King Solomon's Mines, She, Jess, and Allan Quatermain, four books that were to prove among the most popular of ail his voluminous outpouring of fiction in a literary career that spanned more than four decades. Two of those four books. King Solomon's Mines and She, have never been out of print and have captivated the imaginations of authors as diverse as C. S. Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud, Graham Greene, C. G. Jung, Henry Miller, and Frederick Forsyth. The very speed with which Haggard wrote his most celebrated works has become part of the legend, zealously propagated by the author, that they gushed forth unconsciously from mysterious inner springs of creativity. In reality, a great deal of thought and experience contributed to the making of She. the making of a novelist Rider Haggard belonged by birth to the minor country gentry of Victorian England. His was the sort of family that expected eldest sons to inherit the estate and younger sons to go into the army, the church, or the civil service. In important ways, however, the family deviated from the norm. On one side the Haggards could and did lay a shadowy claim to descent from the ancient Norse invaders of eastern Britain, while one of Rider's grandparents had come from Russia and was thought by some to have Jewish ancestry. His father played the bluff, overbearing squire convincingly enough, but his mother, whose father had been in the East India Company service, nourished literary ambitions.^ The family pretended to a social position it could not quite keep up. Haggard's older brothers went to Cambridge, but there was not enough money to give Rider a university education. Apart from a few years at Ipswich Grammar School, he was educated by private tutors. After he tried and failed to enter the public service by "cramming" in London for the annual examinations, his family used Norfolk social connections to find the teenager a position as private secretary to the newly appointed lieutenant governor of Natal, Sir Henry Bulwer.